The meltdown at 60 Minutes has transfixed the media world this week, as CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss fired deeply respected staffers and correspondents, installed broadcast-news outsider Nick Bilton as the show’s executive producer, and sparked a messy standoff with Scott Pelley, who grilled his new boss and accused Weiss of “murdering” the show — all before being shown the door himself. A pointed termination letter, along with a stream of good-bye emails, statements, and rebuttals, have laced the saga with claims of insubordination, incompetence, and bias toward the Trump administration.
To Steve Kroft, who spent three decades at 60 Minutes before retiring in 2019, the show, “as the audience has known it, no longer exists.”
“They’ve made it clear — they being the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison — that they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want,” he tells me. Kroft is not sure, precisely, what 60 Minutes will look like when it resumes: “It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September.”
Kroft points to Donald Trump’s October 2024 lawsuit against CBS News over the editing of a Kamala Harris segment and corporate parent Paramount’s decision to settle with the president the following year — as the company sought FCC approval to complete a merger with Ellison’s Skydance — as the “first sort of skirmish” on the road to the current turmoil. Amid settlement talks, in April 2025, then–executive producer Bill Owens resigned over concerns about editorial independence.
