CNN's Brian Stelter on Bari Weiss, CBS News and David Ellison: 'They have eroded trust.'

Bari Weiss has been the head of CBS News since October 2025, when Paramount owner David Ellison bought her Free Press startup.

Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Free Press

Over the last few weeks, CBS News boss Bari Weiss has fired many of the top correspondents and producers at her network's famed "60 Minutes." One of them subsequently accused her of tilting her coverage to please the Trump administration — which isn't the first time a "60 Minutes" employee has said that.Weiss, and her stewardship of CBS News, has been a huge story for media reporters since she took the job last fall. But Weiss' recent decisions — including hiring Nick Bilton, a former New York Times journalist who has never worked in TV news — have kicked the narrative into overdrive. Some observers are wondering if Paramount owner David Ellison, who installed Weiss at CBS after buying her Free Press startup last fall, may have second thoughts.Meanwhile, Ellison's Paramount is in the final stages of acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which means it would be buying CNN. And all of that is a particularly compelling story for CNN's Brian Stelter, who is both covering Paramount and may work for the company later this year.I asked Stelter to assess Weiss' tenure at CBS, and why the story seems to mean something to people who never watch the network or its news programming. You can hear our entire conversation on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our chat:Peter Kafka: Bari Weiss and Scott Pelley and "60 Minutes" and CBS News and David Ellison is a huge media industry story. Is it a story normal people care about?Brian Stelter: It is. It is the rare media story that has broken containment. I see it in the most-read list on CNN.com. I see it in the engagement on Instagram. I also see it in my inbox, hearing from readers who I almost never hear from.I think it's because "60 Minutes" is bigger than a single hour on television. It's an American institution. And what we've been covering in Trump 2.0 are American institutions under pressure.