CBS News CEO Bari Weiss has ruined 60 Minutes so much that even the newsroom staff has lost faith in the famous show.
Recent staff changes at "60 Minutes" resulted in the departure of several key figures, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss's decision to postpone her report on El Salvador's notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and editor-in-chief Draggan Mihajlovic. Correspondent Anderson Cooper resigned voluntarily.
Weiss appointed former Vanity Fair staffer Nick Bilton, who, like her, has virtually no formal experience in television and radio journalism, to lead the team.
But the 60 Minutes staff doesn't see Weiss's radical restructuring as an optimistic new era for the program—instead, they're almost unanimously predicting that "it's over.".
A Status report reported chaos unfolding behind the scenes, citing "more than half a dozen" employees.
«"They're destroying us," one 60 Minutes staffer told Status. "It's over. I don't see how 60 Minutes can function after this.".
«"Good night and good luck, bastards," they added.
Another senior official told Status that "everyone - 100 percent - thought Tanya and Draggan did an exemplary job.".
«"It hurts. We feel insulted," said a senior employee.
Weiss's tenure as head of the news giant has now lasted seven months, but her business decisions have single-handedly and unequivocally deprived CBS News of its long-standing place in the prestigious American media landscape. What was once considered the "gold standard" of broadcasting and home to such respected journalism figures as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow has since become a graveyard of journalistic ethics.
In a statement provided to The New York Times, Vega said she was "very fearful of what the future holds for the legendary broadcast.".
«"In recent months, my crews and I have faced attempts to introduce political bias into our reporting," Vega wrote. "Reporters have refrained from submitting proposals on important news topics for fear of internal repercussions.".
«"Let's call a spade a spade: censorship, both imposed and self-initiated. It's dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy," the George Polk Award-winning journalist noted.
But CBS's parent company, Paramount, was ready and willing to sacrifice "60 Minutes" long before that. The media conglomerate undermined its position by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Donald Trump over the program's 2024 interview with Kamala Harris, apparently attempting to win the administration's favor ahead of its multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance.
As a result, the series lost two high-profile showrunners, including "60 Minutes" producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount's approach to settling Trump's baseless lawsuit.
Owens, who has largely kept a low profile since leaving the show, shared his thoughts on Weiss's recent changes to Status. "They're killing '60 Minutes,'" he said.