Staffers have taken to calling it “Black Thursday.”
On May 28, a half-dozen senior producers and correspondents at “60 Minutes,” the longest-running and highest-rated news program in the country, were unceremoniously shown the door. Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, as well as executive producer Tanya Simon and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, were among them. The firings were carried out by Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, who’d clashed with Alfonsi in December over her “60 Minutes” report “Inside CECOT,” which told the stories of Venezuelan migrants who’d suffered horrific abuse at an El Salvadoran prison after being deported there by the Trump administration. Weiss pulled the piece hours before it was set to air, demanding it include the perspective of Stephen Miller or another high-ranking Trump official. In an email to her colleagues, Alfonsi said she’d already made multiple requests to officials for comment, and that Weiss’ move was “not an editorial decision, it was a political one.” She added, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
That same day in May, Weiss installed Nick Bilton, a tech columnist and reporter with no broadcast journalism experience, as Simon’s successor at the helm of “60 Minutes.” Weiss and Bilton had grown fond of each other while collaborating on numerous documentary projects for Netflix that never saw the light of day.
Then, on June 1, Scott Pelley, a 37-year CBS newsman and the de facto face of the network, attended an all-hands meeting with Bilton and the rest of the newsmagazine’s staff (Weiss was noticeably absent). Frustrated by the firings and the lack of any explanation to staff — particularly about the ouster of Simon, the daughter of legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon — Pelley questioned Bilton’s credentials and accused Weiss of “murdering ‘60 Minutes.’” The following day, Pelley was fired in a scathing letter from Bilton accusing him of “remarkable incivility and contempt.” That left “60 Minutes” with only three correspondents (down from seven) following the resignation of Anderson Cooper, a 20-year veteran of the program, in February. (A CBS News spokesperson says, “CBS News is not able to say why we parted ways with any one person due to HR and legal considerations.”)
I spoke with six former “60 Minutes” staffers, including award-winning correspondents, producers and executives, about the chaos that’s unfolded there under Weiss, a former op-ed columnist and founder of The Free Press who had no broadcast journalism — and scant investigative reporting — experience prior to being given the keys to CBS News.
“We have to acknowledge that ‘60 Minutes’ needed a bit of a facelift, and there were potentially positive ways to improve the program, but it’s the way they have gone about it,” a former “60 Minutes” staffer says. “You don’t give a facelift with a fucking machete.”
The opening salvo came on July 1, 2025. On that day, CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global, chose to settle what critics call a baseless $16 million lawsuit brought by President Trump against “60 Minutes” over an October 2024 interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris that was lightly edited for broadcast. (Trump broke with decades-long tradition and refused to sit down for his own “60 Minutes” interview during the campaign.)
The timing was curious, to say the least. Paramount had an $8 billion merger pending with David Ellison’s Skydance Media that required FCC approval, and FCC chairman Brendan Carr, an outspoken Trump loyalist, had opened up a “news distortion” inquiry into “60 Minutes” over the Harris interview. Six days after the Trump settlement, the Paramount-Skydance merger was complete, and Ellison, a Trump ally, was in charge of CBS. One of his first big moves there was choosing not to renew the contract of “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, three days after Colbert called the Trump settlement “a big fat bribe”; the second was appointing Kenneth Weinstein, a Trump adviser and chair at the conservative think tank Hudson Institute, as CBS News’ ombudsman.
“Trump filed a lawsuit that everybody laughed at — about editing — and you’d never think he could win that lawsuit in court, but he basically makes your lawyers impotent,” explains Lowell Bergman, the celebrated former “60 Minutes” producer. “He has a habit of filing lawsuits that he can’t win, and now that he’s the president of the United States, he has a lever and can win, so it’s a form of extortion.”
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Bergman joined “60 Minutes” in 1983 and, working with correspondent Mike Wallace, produced dozens of high-impact stories over his 14-year tenure — including an interview with tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand that was dramatized in the 1999 film “The Insider.” (Bergman was played by Al Pacino.) He won a Pulitzer Prize with The New York Times in 2004 and teaches journalism at UC Berkeley.
In a bizarre twist, Chris Wallace, the former Fox News anchor and son of Mike Wallace, is a senior adviser to RedBird Capital Partners, which provided $2 billion in financial backing for Skydance’s Paramount takeover. He declined to comment on the state of “60 Minutes,” writing, “As an adviser at RedBird Capital, which has an interest in Paramount, I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that.” When I mention this to Bergman, he laughs and says, “Sounds about right to me.”
Bergman has a history with Trump too. Though he didn’t produce the segment, Bergman was there when Wallace conducted a sit-down interview with Trump on “60 Minutes” in 1985, which served as the real estate scion’s big coming-out party. He recalls trying to give Wallace a tip about a criminal complaint concerning Trump, Roy Cohn, the Genovese crime family and the delivery of cement during the construction of Trump Tower. While Bergman was talking to Wallace, he claims, a producer intervened and told him, “We’re not doing that kind of story.”
“[Trump] has always wanted to be a celebrity. He is a celebrity. And he’s living in a world that we all now know is that of a reality-TV star who’s constantly trying to rescript things that he’s said, or go backwards,” says Bergman. “The issue here is the open attempt by the president and the White House to destroy parts of the media that disagree with him. This has never happened before.”
Steve Kroft, who was a “60 Minutes” correspondent for 30 years until retiring in 2019, echoes Bergman’s assessment. He believes that Trump has had it out for the newsmagazine since the Harris piece, and that Ellison and Weiss haven’t demonstrated a desire to stand up to him. Ellison is, after all, still seeking FCC approval of Paramount-Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“This started as an argument between Trump and the show over the Kamala Harris piece, and the president of the United States made it very clear that he’d like to see this broadcast go away,” Kroft says. “He wanted to do away with it, and he’s intimated that from that point on. Some of the ruthlessness is coming directly from the president as a way to influence and make sure that Bari and David Ellison fall in line.”
Indeed, Trump has posted dozens of messages to Truth Social excoriating “60 Minutes” and attacking everyone from Pope Leo to Marjorie Taylor Greene over the program’s segments. Shortly before Pelley was fired, Trump went after him during a podcast appearance, saying he was “terrible” and part of a “gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”
“The Trump administration is concerned with the coverage of the Trump administration. And ‘60 Minutes’ has been tough on the first and second Trump administrations and are not afraid to call them out on things, and I don’t think this administration wants to tolerate it,” Kroft reasons. “That’s why you’ve seen this whole thing blow up.”
Ellison’s third big swing at CBS came in October, when he purchased The Free Press for $150 million, folded it into CBS News and tapped Weiss, a media provocateur who’d made a career out of targeting the “woke” left and the mainstream media, as CBS News’ editor-in-chief, reporting directly to him. Despite having little background in television journalism, Weiss was placed in charge of CBS News and its crown jewel, “60 Minutes,” which Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard debuted in 1968.
David Ellison
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The problems began almost immediately. On the night of Jan. 5, during Tony Dokoupil’s first official day as anchor of “CBS Evening News,” Weiss reportedly added lines to a segment on the U.S. military’s capture of Nicolás Maduro that cast the actions of the Trump administration in a more positive light. “This was unusual — the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly — but Weiss was the new boss,” reported Vanity Fair. Two nights later, “CBS Evening News” aired a fawning segment on Secretary of State Marco Rubio that concluded, “Marco Rubio, we salute you.”
That meddling is said to have extended to “60 Minutes,” a program that prides itself on its editorial independence. After her firing last month, Alfonsi issued a blistering statement accusing Weiss and network leadership of “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.” Vega alleged the same on her way out the door, writing she’d “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.” Pelley said Weiss injected “falsehoods and bias” into his stories, including a piece on the ICE crackdowns in Minnesota, telling The New York Times that she demanded he “make the protesters look more violent” and describe Renée Good, who was shot to death and then mocked by ICE agents, as “driving toward the officer,” which Pelley said was contradicted by video evidence. (A CBS News spokesperson disputes Pelley’s claim, characterizing Weiss’ suggestions as part of “an editorial back-and-forth” with “no political motivation.”)
“You have three respected ‘60 Minutes’ journalists saying that Bari or her lieutenants have tried to insert misstatements in their stories,” says Betsy West, who oversaw “60 Minutes” as senior vice president of CBS News from 1998 to 2005. “She pulled a factual and legally vetted story about the conditions in Venezuela prisons just because the administration wouldn’t give a comment, essentially giving them veto power by not talking. News staff members at morning meetings that are supposed to be a rundown of the news say they often devolve into grievance sessions about Mideast politics or candidates [Weiss] opposes. It feels like she and the people she reports to are trying to check the independence of ‘60 Minutes’ and ultimately undermine the free press that undergirds our democracy.”
In addition to the claims made by Alfonsi, Vega and Pelley, Weiss drew criticism for her actions surrounding last month’s “60 Minutes” interview with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though ’60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl had spent months trying to land the sit-down, the interview was ultimately conducted by Major Garrett, a CBS correspondent who doesn’t work for “60 Minutes.” It was widely criticized for not pushing back at a number of Netanyahu’s more dubious claims. As the New York Post reported, Weiss gave Netanyahu his choice of interviewer “as part of a last-ditch effort to clinch the interview for the network.” The segment earned Weiss personal praise from former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, who tweeted, “Thank you, Bari Weiss.”
Rome Hartman was a producer at “60 Minutes” for more than 25 years, working on more than 160 pieces, mostly with Stahl. He retired from the show in 2025, just prior to Weiss’ arrival. “I’ve never spoken with Bari Weiss, so I can’t imagine what her motives are. She’s an opinion journalist,” Hartman says. “There’s a valid and important place for opinion journalism, but that’s not what’s necessary to run a news organization that prides itself on playing it straight.”
“I know she’s proudly pro-Israel, and fine. But that’s not the position that the leader of an objective news organization ought to be taking,” Hartman maintains. “‘60 Minutes’ has neither been pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian; it’s just tried to tell the stories. There have been scores of Middle East pieces on ‘60 Minutes’ — I did a few of them with Lesley Stahl. It was always our mission to play it straight. She comes in as a self-declared ‘Zionist fanatic,’ and I’m sorry, but that should disqualify her from playing an editorial role in CBS News coverage of Israel. It doesn’t qualify her for it; it should disqualify her for it.”
Cecilia Vega and Scott Pelley
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Between the firings and the allegations of editorial interference and kowtowing to the Trump administration, Hartman is stunned by the damage Weiss has inflicted on the venerable newsmagazine. “I know the place inside and out, and I care about it deeply,” he says. “This last week has been, for me, like watching an arsonist burn down my professional home and not really having the means to do anything about it.”
Weiss’ dismantling of “60 Minutes” is even more puzzling considering how well it was doing. Under Simon’s leadership, it was the top-rated news show in the country, drawing 9.1 million weekly viewers — a 9% increase from the previous year. On May 21, just a week before Black Thursday, CBS released a glowing press release touting how “60 Minutes” made history as the No. 1 news show for 52 consecutive seasons, writing that it “reached new heights across digital and social media as audiences turned to ‘60 Minutes’ across every major platform in record numbers: 2.5 billion video views, over 105 million engagements, and adding nearly 17 million followers across platforms.”
“Digital engagement was up dramatically last year with ‘60 Minutes’ stories under Tanya’s one year of being in charge,” says Hartman. “It was innovating, reaching new audiences, finding people on the devices where they’re getting their news, and even the 7 p.m. audience on Sunday nights was growing, and there aren’t many programs of any kind that can say that other than NFL football.”
During his interview with The New York Times after his ouster, Pelley provided some context for his fiery statements directed at Bilton during that tumultuous all-hands meeting. The day prior, “Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved.”
Pelley also defended his actions during the all-hands to the Times, saying he was only asking “hard questions” during a meeting “about whether ‘60 Minutes’ was even going to survive.”
“Scott wasn’t shouting at him or physically intimidating the guy — he was doing exactly what he should’ve done in the best tradition of the best ‘60 Minutes’ correspondents,” Hartman says. “And if Nick Bilton is such a snowflake that he can’t possibly tolerate a voice of challenge — and if Bari Weiss has to hide behind his skirts — that does not speak well of how he’s going to run the place or how she’s going to run the place.”
Last week, longtime correspondents Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim announced they’d be staying at “60 Minutes.” The trio also acknowledged how demoralizing and disheartening the recent spate of firings, and the lack of explanation for them, has been.
“We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at ‘60 Minutes,’” the three journalists said in a letter to their colleagues. “We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who everyone respected. As far as we can tell — because no explanation has ever been offered, they were expelled because they fought for our ‘60 Minutes’ values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity. Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships. Collaboration and argument are the way we have always worked at ‘60.’”
They concluded, “We don’t want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die. … If we can continue doing the work that made this show what it is — committing acts of independent, fearless journalism and storytelling — we’re here for it. If not, we leave.” (Ellison reportedly reached out to Stahl on Monday to assure her that “60 Minutes” would retain its “editorial independence,” and apologized for the chaos.)
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Kroft says he was “very happy” to see Stahl, Whitaker and Wertheim stay at the newsmagazine while lamenting the callous way Weiss has treated the senior “60 Minutes” staffers she’d gotten rid of.
“That [callousness] doesn’t come as a surprise to me at all. I’ve been hearing about this from staff members for the past six months or so,” Kroft says. “They’ve been shameless in their directions and shameless in their actions. I hope it’s going to come to an end, but I don’t have a great deal of confidence in Bari Weiss to do what she says that she’s going to do. She hasn’t done it so far. I think it’s going to be more of the same, and it’ll be interesting to see how much Lesley, Bill and Jon will put up with.”
Looming over everything is Paramount-Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN. Last December, The Wall Street Journal reported that in private meetings, Ellison “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.” Days after the Journal’s story published, Trump publicly stated, “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” and called its leadership a “disgrace.”
On Tuesday, Axios reported that Ellison will be tapping Weiss to “oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN” should the acquisition go through. All six former “60 Minutes” staffers who spoke to me expressed worry that what’s happening at CBS News could be a harbinger of things to come at CNN.
Kroft isn’t so sure. “I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing ‘60 Minutes’ for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” he says. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”
