The Outgoing Greats of 60 Minutes

Make it all make sense, Bari Weiss and Jeff Bezos! Plus: The Lens sees clearly.

When news broke yesterday that Bari Weiss, CBS News’s editor in chief, had ousted Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, I was shocked but not surprised. In addition to Simon and Alfonsi, Weiss fired Draggan Mihailovich, the show’s executive editor; Cecilia Vega, the first Latina correspondent; Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer; and Guy Campanile, a producer. “The arrogance, cruelty, and incompetence is stunning,” Alfonsi said to me, when I reached out to her about the news.

The shake-up follows months of tension between Weiss and the 60 Minutes team, which erupted in December when Weiss abruptly pulled one of Alfonsi’s segments, a piece about a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. Alfonsi criticized the move at the time, writing in a note to colleagues that the decision, “after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” Despite Weiss’s request for more reporting, the segment eventually aired with relatively minor changes.