The Murder of ‘60 Minutes’
Bari Weiss is turning the best TV news show ever into Trump’s personal fleshlight.
1. Corporate
This week a bunch of people you’ve likely never heard of were pushed out of 60 Minutes by Bari Weiss. Simultaneously, Weiss handed control of the program to someone else you’ve probably never heard of.
I know how boring that sounds, but it’s important. What is happening at 60 Minutes is a demonstration of how institutions fail in an age of autocracy. And it is an object lesson in the dangers corporate ownership poses to free media.
This is inside baseball. But you need to understand it. Let’s go.
60 Minutes is the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism. When journalism migrated from the page to the screen, it was mostly a bad thing for society. But 60 Minutes was the best-case scenario—an example of what serious investigative journalism could achieve in the TV format.
Part of the show’s success was economic. 60 Minutes didn’t just produce outstanding journalism—it made money. It proved that good journalism could succeed on TV and didn’t need to be regarded as a charity or a loss-leader. In 2024, just as a for-instance, 60 Minutes made $206 million in advertising.
Because of this industry-leading success, the show has always been allowed to run independently within the organization that is CBS News. 60 Minutes was its own beast, a state within a state. The show’s independence was such a big deal that when CBS corporate interfered with it in the 1990s, the whole world took notice and Michael Mann made a big-budget movie about the incident.
That’s the backdrop.
Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties.
But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix.
So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent.
This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper.
It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.
2. 60
Weiss took control of CBS News partway through the show’s season and almost immediately she broke the show’s independence. Despite knowing nothing about either investigative reporting or broadcast journalism, she inserted herself into 60 Minutes, first in trivial ways, and then in big ones: She spiked a story about CECOT and she approached Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been in talks to sit for an interview with Leslie Stahl, and allowed him to choose his own interviewer.
It was clear that Weiss intended to put 60 Minutes completely under her personal control so that the show could no longer upset President Trump. After the current season wrapped last week, Weiss went to work with all of those firings we talked about at the very top.
You might recognize the names of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. You probably don’t know who Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich are because they were among behind-the-camera producers and editors who run the show. As of this week, Weiss has gotten rid of all of them.
Simon was the executive producer in charge of 60. Weiss replaced her with Nick Bilton, a guy who has written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and never done a blessed thing in broadcast news—let alone managed a giant organization.1
Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire ran a piece heartily endorsing Bilton’s hire.
3. Indie Rock
Corporate ownership of media companies is a smaller issue in normal times because the corporate owners don’t have to worry about the government seeking retribution.
In 2004, 60 Minutes ran a story about George W. Bush that relied on forged documents. It was a major scandal—but no one at CBS’s corporate parent worried that Bush’s FCC was going to pull their broadcast license or that Bush’s FTC would block the purchase of another corporate property in retaliation.2
We do not live in normal times. The clearest example of this I can give you is that Trump unilaterally imposed massive tariffs. The Supreme Court ruled that these tariffs were unconstitutional and that the companies who paid them should be refunded their money. Trump then went on TV to proclaim that companies should let him keep the money, promising that he’d look favorably on those that don’t ask for it back—“I’ll remember them”—and implicitly warning he’d keep track of which businesses do ask for it back.
Command economy. Gangster government. Socialism. Whatever you want to call it, this is an authoritarian age. And in an authoritarian age, the corporate ownership of media is dangerous because corporations are financially incentivized to turn their media outlets into fleshlights for the Dear Leader.
We should be clear: Bari Weiss is murdering 60 Minutes. She is doing so not out of incompetence or foolishness, but with malice aforethought. She is doing it at the behest of her corporate patron, because while she may cause CBS News to lose millions of dollars, her stroking of Trump will gain David Ellison billions of dollars.
That’s what is happening. And anyone who pretends that this is about “free speech,” or adapting to an age of “new media,” or confronting “dangerous ideas,” or reclaiming some “forgotten audience” is selling you something.
The only antidote is building media institutions independent of corporate ties. Which is what we’ve done here at The Bulwark.
There are downsides to being independent. You don’t have enormous corporate resources to tap. We can’t build out giant production teams; we can’t put reporters on the ground in the Middle East. We can’t do incredibly slick infographics. We can only grow as fast as our revenue grows—which means that everything we do has to be sustainable. Which is a fancy word for “slow.”
In truth, there’s only one upside to being independent:
We’re in control and our incentives are aligned with yours.
No one tells us what to say, or whom to fire. We are not a loss leader for some other division. We exist to tell you the truth and create value for you, the people who read and watch us.
I don’t know Nick Bilton. Never met the guy. But I cannot imagine what sort of journalist would look at Bari Weiss and everything that has gone down at CBS News over the last few months and think, Yeah, baby! I want to be part of that!
Maybe he’s attracted to the resources; to the ability to do all those things we can’t do. Or maybe it’s something else. I dunno.
But for me? Eight years ago I decided that as God is my witness, I was never going to be at the mercy of some corporate d-bag. Not ever again. I would live and die with you guys.
The Bulwark isn’t 60 Minutes. We’re never going to be 60 Minutes. And that’s a shame, because 60 Minutes—the real show, not the Frankenstein Bari and Bilton will ship under the legacy brand—ought to exist in the world. It’s good. It has value.
I hope someone out there builds a new 60 Minutes, soon. (Hi Laurene! 👋)
But what we’re doing here has its own value. It deserves to be nurtured and supported by the people who consume it—not just through membership, but through the discussions we have here together and evangelization and honesty and camaraderie.
If you want to give David Ellison, Bari Weiss, and the rest of Trump’s oligarchs and vampires the finger, come and join us. Become a member. Introduce yourself in the comments. Share this piece with someone you know.
Those mf’ers might be rich and powerful. But what they’re doing is bankrupt. Everyone can see it.
And we’re coming for them.
New York magazine asked Bilton about this lack of experience: “Bilton mentioned how he came to Vanity Fair as a reporter but also started hosting a podcast: ‘I’d never done that before,’ he said.”
Funnily enough, the very next year CBS’s corporate parent, Viacom (later renamed Paramount), purchased the studio DreamWorks SKG. The merger went through cleanly. No one spent any time worrying that Bush would block it because 60 Minutes had attacked him unfairly.
I have a lot of thoughts, and some of them are things I've said before (which likely breaks JVL's rule about good comments being necessary):
1. I'm so grateful for the Bulwark, and I hope this business succeeds because I WANT to see journalism succeed. Journalism NEEDS to succeed as a business if we want to keep this republic. The hard part is making journalism succeed at scale.
2. I'm a former TV journalist. I was nowhere near the level of 60 Minutes, but I really want to believe that TV journalism can still have an impact and still matter. It's struggling right now for a lot of reasons, and a lot of people have put in a lot of work to try to make it a viable business model, but even under the best of circumstances, it's a HARD gig. It's hard for reporters, it's hard for producers, it's hard for everyone.
3. The actions of the Ellisons confirm a belief that I stated in another post by JVL: There is nothing that the oligarchic class fears more than capitalism. Not socialism, but capitalism. If you have a proper and well-regulated capitalist market out there, that means you can't run a business in the ground and get rewarded for it. But we don't have it, and these oligarchs will do everything they can to make sure we don't have that (the irony, of course, is that in doing so they're laying the ground for what will ultimately be their own demise).
4. Is there a solution to this? If Democrats take power again, they could and should pass more antitrust legislation and go about doing some good ol' fashioned trust busting, but I suspect the Supreme Court will scream bloody murder and throw itself in front of any legislation that could negatively affect their donors.
One thing that I have been thinking about is in the discussion about MLB's CBA, the owners are adamant that they want a salary cap. They want a salary cap because they want to have a ceiling for laborers' earnings but no limit to their profits. A higher marginal tax rate would be a good way to put a limit on earnings for corporations. At the very least, I'd like to see Democrats try to do that.
I'm 67. I watched 60 Min religiously growing up and into adulthood. I miss it. I did meet Ed Bradley on the slopes of Vail in 1983 when he stopped to help me up after I fell. He had a face covering on, but I recognized his voice, because.