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Friends,
CBS News’s new Editor in Chief, Bari Weiss, recently announced in an email to staff that the network was parting ways with the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, and substituting Nick Bilton.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bilton said he was excited “to take what I believe is largely an unutilized news brand and take it into the modern age.”
Unutilized? Modern age?
At a time when broadcast news is in crisis, “60 Minutes” is anything but. It’s the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history. It has remained the #1 news program for 50 straight years and consistently ranks among the top 10 of all Nielsen-rated television programs.
And it pulls in a fortune for CBS. “60 Minutes” is one of the most profitable programs in all of television, generating tens of millions in annual profit for CBS. In one recent year its advertising revenues were $67.5 million. The network wholly owns the franchise, which makes it a goldmine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.
This goes beyond “if it ain’t broke ….”
At a staff meeting yesterday, famed correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded. (Scott Pelley gets this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)
I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?
One hint: Besides chucking its executive producer, Weiss’s has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
In December, Alfonsi challenged Weiss’s decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on an El Salvador maximum-security prison where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, including alleged gang members. Weiss raised concerns about the comment-seeking process and determined that it needed additional reporting. Alfonsi termed the decision a political move. (The segment, called “Inside CECOT,” eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)
Alfonsi calls the network’s decision to allow her contract to expire “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” that “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
Vega is no less blunt. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”
Of course it’s censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trump’s assets to get Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.
Trump’s “fingerprints and DNA are all over this,” veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft says. “He’s been making threats against 60 Minutes and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”
Trump has fixated on “60 Minutes” for years, calling the show "a dishonest Political Operative disguised as News." He sued CBS News over an interview of then presidential candidate Kamala Harris that Trump claimed has been edited unfairly to him. After the “60 Minutes” aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, he said CBS “should lose their license.”
This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as correspondent Scott Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a goldmine. Politically, it’s dangerous as hell to Trump.
Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone who’s been fired from “60 Minutes” knows this. Trump’s lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.
You need to know this.
“60 Minutes” — the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history — is being dismantled because Trump doesn’t want America to know the truth.
Trump’s increasingly corrupt political system — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing a corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaire and multi-billionaires, and monopolists.
When political and economic deal-making become personal transactions, when greed and payoffs replace trust, what happens? Authoritarianism replaces democracy. And an economy collapses, as it did at the end of America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.
One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s dispicable reign.
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