'60 Minutes' Has Issues, but Being 'Woke' Was Never One of Them
The newsmagazine is the crown jewel of broadcast journalism in the United States. It was also a terrible place to work — especially for women.
Over the decades, the journalists at 60 Minutes have covered countless stories of global significance: The My Lai massacre. The murder of Emmett Till. Watergate.
Launched in September 1968 with an episode that went behind the scenes at that summer’s party conventions, 60 Minutes has been the No. 1 news program in the United States for a staggering 52 seasons straight. The newsmagazine, with its iconic ticking clock, is a singular institution in American TV: a commercially successful, widely-watched program known for its exceptional journalistic standards.
Since she was handpicked by a billionaire nepo baby to run CBS News last year, despite being an opinion writer with virtually no experience overseeing complicated investigations or producing TV news, Bari Weiss has taken a wrecking ball to the show.
In December, she yanked a report by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi on the hellish conditions at CECOT, the Salvadorean megaprison housing people deported by the Trump administration. The segment leaked online, went viral, and was finally broadcast a month later than originally scheduled, opposite an NFL playoff game on NBC.
Then last week, Weiss committed the journalistic equivalent of the Red Wedding, firing much of the show’s leadership, including executive producer Tanya Simon, a 26-year veteran of 60 Minutes who took over the show last year and steered it to record ratings. Weiss replaced her with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist whose scant TV credits include producing one documentary seven years ago and writing a few episodes of the catastrophically bad HBO Series The Idol.
Weiss also canned Alfonsi, who had been openly critical of the decision to shelve her CECOT piece, and Cecilia Vega, the show’s first Latina correspondent, who in a statement said that in recent months she and her producing team faced pressure “to insert political bias into our stories.”
At a staff meeting Monday, esteemed correspondent Scott Pelley went nuclear, saying Weiss was “murdering” the show and questioning Bilton’s “slender qualifications” for the job. On Tuesday, he too was fired, essentially for doing what should be standard for journalists: asking tough questions of people in power. In a statement Wednesday, he said that he had been pressured to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a story by the network’s new management.
On Friday, remaining correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim issued a joint statement saying they would stick with the show because “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.”
Given the collective institutional knowledge that has departed — and may yet leave — it is now uncertain whether 60 Minutes, which averaged 9 million viewers a week last season, will even be on the air with new episodes come September.
The crisis comes as David Ellison, the CEO who hired Weiss and paid a whopping $150 million for The Free Press, tries to acquire Warner Bros Discovery and gain control of CNN. He has not been shy about courting the favor of one very specific TV viewer: in April, Ellison hosted a gala dinner “honoring the Trump White House” that was attended by Weiss.
Many have noted the hypocrisy of Weiss — a supposed champion of free speech who flounced out of her plum gig at The New York Times in 2020 because she believed the paper of record was intolerant of dissenting opinions — firing Pelley for saying a few things she didn’t want to hear.
Social media is rife with jokes about how Weiss, an anti-woke crusader, critic of trans rights, and unwavering supporter of the Israeli government, might reshape 60 Minutes. (Like this from the satirical account NYTPitchbot: “I’m Kid Rock.” “I’m Naomi Wolf.”“I’m Kanye West.” “I’m Matt Taibbi.” “I’m Catturd. Those stories, plus Rob Schneider, tonight on 60 Minutes.’) It’s not that far-fetched: Weiss already conducted a much-hyped town hall with Erika Kirk and hired a slew of dubious contributors at CBS News, including supposed longevity expert Peter Attia, who had to step down because of vile emails he sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
Weiss’s efforts to reshape CBS News (which also include installing Tony Doukopil as anchor of the evening news broadcast) have been lauded by FCC chair Brendan Carr, who recently told the Financial Times that he supported anyone who challenges “school-of-fish groupthink” in the media (a phrase that could have been lifted straight out of a Weiss memo).
It is understandable that people are upset by her sabotage of a revered TV institution, particularly when Weiss is so clearly catering to an audience of one (Trump, as we know, is fixated on 60 Minutes) and has no interest in “modernizing” the broadcast like she claims.
Ironically, though, by targeting 60 Minutes, Weiss has dismantled a show that for decades was anything but a bastion of wokeness or liberal advocacy journalism. The only story that has been retracted in the last two decades is Lara Logan’s report on Benghazi, which hinged on a fabricated eyewitness account (and was highly critical of the Obama administration). CBS also famously delayed airing reports about torture at Abu Ghraib and tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. If the show is beholden to anyone, it’s risk-averse corporate lawyers and ad sales executives, not a specific political party.
60 Minutes became the crown jewel of broadcast journalism by exposing hypocrisy, misconduct, and corruption. But for decades, it was also a workplace where verbal abuse and sexual harassment were apparently rampant.
Don Hewitt, the legendary newsman who created the show, was accused of repeat sexual misconduct. According to The New York Times, in the 1990s CBS reached a legal settlement with a former employee who claimed that Hewitt sexually assaulted her multiple times and “destroyed her career.” As of 2018, the woman had been paid $5 million. Sally Quinn claimed that Hewitt sabotaged her TV career after she rejected a romantic overture from him. (Hewitt didn’t deny hitting on her.) Women who managed to make it at 60 Minutes didn’t always last long: Hewitt fired pregnant correspondent Meredith Vieira in 1991 because, he said, “I need someone who can pull his or her own weight.”
Mike Wallace, the equally renowned correspondent, was apparently nearly as bad as his boss. In 2021, former producer Ira Rosen published a tell-all book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, in which he recalled Wallace regularly groping women’s bodies and snapping their bras. He accused Wallace and Hewitt of “Neanderthal behavior toward women.”
Writer Mark Hertsgaard witnessed similar conduct while reporting a piece for Rolling Stone in 1992 that Hewitt allegedly tried to get killed.
Most upsettingly, given 60’s reputation for holding the powerful to account, people in positions of authority within CBS News have consistently downplayed or tried to bury reporting about the treatment of women at the show.
In 2017, executive producer Jeff Fager published a book on the history of 60 Minutes that left out the more unsavory aspects of the Hewitt-Wallace era. He reportedly took over the project when another writer, Richard Zoglin, started asking too many questions about women at the show. A year later, Fager, who became the second person to run 60 Minutes after Hewitt stepped down in 2004, was fired for sending a threatening text to a reporter looking into sexual harassment allegations against him and Les Moonves, then the network’s CEO.
It’s possible that Weiss, who has decried the supposed excesses of #MeToo, would be fine with a return to the days when the network’s stars could snap women’s bras with impunity. What’s clear is that she is happy to undo the progress 60 Minutes was just beginning to make, and that she has little interest in producing the kind of hard-hitting journalism that made men like Wallace and Hewitt untouchable for so long.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian.
No wonder women are easily losing their rights, given what has always happened in the background of 60 Minutes. Men just simply do not care. I am disappointed that Lesley Stahl, Bill Whittaker and Jason Wertheim did not resign. It gives the appearance that they are okay with what is happening with Ellison and Weiss. We need people who stand up for our democracy - NOT pretend that what is happening is okay.