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.
It’s also broken through because it’s a boss versus employee or an employee versus boss story. A lot of people have fantasies about speaking up and speaking truth to power to the boss. And on one level, that’s what Pelley did.
I think the broader reason this is breaking through is because there is anxiety about where news is coming from. Is news trustworthy? Are newsrooms under pressure? What’s going on inside a place like CBS News?
“60 Minutes” is done making new shows until the fall. Will it be an entirely reimagined “60 Minutes” then, or will it look like “60 Minutes” was this year?
I think it will look mostly like “60 Minutes” this year. Bilton said to me when he was first hired, “The core of ’60 Minutes’ will remain ’60.'” He said, “The Sunday show will not change.”
Of course it will have to, to some degree, because he needs to hire correspondents. And Bari Weiss is excited about that part.
She wants to bring in new talent, new outside voices and energy. I think she probably wants to use some resources from The Free Press. But for the most part, it’s still going to be three mini-documentaries every Sunday.
The real concern is about whether the show’s going to go soft in some way. But Weiss has said to her friends she wants the show to go hard. She wants hard-hitting investigations, and Bilton has said he is green-lighting stories about the Trump administration.
Last week, Scott Pelley sat down with The New York Times for a pretty extraordinary interview. You don’t normally see people do that after they’ve been publicly fired. What are your takeaways?
There are moments where he sounds self-indulgent. There were moments that I found hard to believe. [Like when] Pelley says he had never heard of Bari Weiss until she was hired.
That’s impossible to believe. The fact that Bari Weiss was going to take over CBS News had been reported for a long time. Even if that’s not the kind of thing you would normally pay attention to, you’d want to know about your new boss.
It also didn’t make sense to me that he claimed he didn’t think he was going to be fired after speaking up to the boss. Everyone was on firing watch, expecting him to be fired at any moment.
But overall, he made a really important point directly to Paramount. He said what many of his colleagues still at CBS feel. He said to the leadership, “This can be fixed.” He said, “Bari Weiss is a lovely person who has been put in the wrong job. You can still land this plane.”
Pelley also said he has evidence of Bari Weiss interfering with the news in a way that is politically motivated. That’s the second time someone from “60 Minutes” has said that out loud.
In both cases, I think a fair-minded observer could say, “That sounds bad, but also I’m not 100% sure that what he says is political bias is necessarily political bias.”
In Pelley’s case, they did a story about federal agents killing Renée Good, and his interpretation is that Bari Weiss wanted that piece balanced in a way that benefited the Trump administration.
But I can imagine some nuance: “Look, are we covering all the angles? Are we dotting all the i’s? And what we say in an email is not what we put out as a report.”
You’re hitting on this tug-of-war between one side saying it’s political interference and the other side saying, “No, this is just how newsrooms work. We’re just having editorial discussions. And there should be a push and pull.” I understand why it was concerning to him. But I don’t know if it adds up to a real thumb on the scale the way he says.
[I’ve asked Weiss for comment. A CBS News rep says Weiss’ proposed changes “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”]
There’s now this idea that the “60 Minutes” controversy might be too much for Ellison to bear — either because it’s embarrassing, or maybe it’s a problem with regulators. But he’s presumably going to own Paramount for decades, and if he wants to, he can have a very long view and not worry about what people like you and I are saying in the spring of 2026. Do you think there’s any reason he says, “Actually, the Bari Weiss experiment is a failure or needs to be changed in some meaningful way?”
I don’t know. I urge everybody to go back and reread his memo from October when he hired Bari Weiss and bought The Free Press.
He talked about how polarized the country is, how destabilized our politics feel, how the extremes are winning out, and how companies like Paramount have a responsibility to help people know what is real in the world.
He said a lot of really powerful things in that memo about restoring trust. Has Weiss restored trust in media? That’s the fair question to ask nine months later.
In Pelley’s interview, he notes that “60 Minutes” is still doing well. But Paramount is saying that “60 Minutes” needs to be blown up — that it’s a melting ice cube, in Nick Bilton’s language, and it needs to move to the future.
A successful broadcast television show that attracts millions of viewers is not nothing. Do you think it should be blown up? Or eased into something else?
I find it to be a very persuasive, compelling argument that “60 Minutes” — and I acknowledge this is mostly the Weiss camp saying this on background — that “60 Minutes” is really powerful, but it’s out of date. It’s archaic. It’s too insular.
Weiss is clearly determined to make her mark at “60 Minutes” and not allow the historic insularity of “60 Minutes” to continue.
There are some really strong arguments for why you should evolve now — from a position of strength while the show is still highly rated — rather than wait for the ratings to erode. The line that Bilton and Weiss used internally was, “If you don’t disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted.”
I think the history of media shows that is true. But it always comes down to, not whether to do it, but how you do it. How do you execute on the plan? Isn’t this the story we cover over and over again? People doing the right things, maybe in the wrong ways.
But doesn’t this look like what David Ellison wanted when he brought in Bari Weiss — who has zero television experience and is an ideologue — and said, “I want you to run this news organization, including ’60 Minutes,’ and I want you to blow it up?”
There’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying. I have perceived from people close to Weiss that she looked around CBS News and was shocked by just how obsolete some of the operations were back when she arrived.
She looked around, and she said, “This place has been losing, so I’m not gonna be tethered to what you were doing for 10 or 20 years. It wasn’t working.”
And she had a lot of latitude, and does today, thanks to Ellison. But Ellison also said in his announcement the day that she was hired that “We’re going to make CBS News the most trusted name in news.”
We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.” The issue now is a lot of these actions, a lot of these controversies, they have eroded trust. They have not built trust back.
[Ellison, in a Sunday telephone call to “60” correspondent Lesley Stahl, said he would respect the editorial independence of the program, Stahl told the Times on Tuesday.]
You’re at CNN, reporting on the company that is likely to own CNN later this year. What’s the vibe in the room?
Yeah. I’m covering the Paramount saga from inside the company that Paramount is trying to acquire.
I am very happy to say I have full autonomy to do so. No one is influencing my reporting. No one’s reviewing what I’m saying on TV. I’m really blessed to have that autonomy.
So let’s play this merger out for a moment. Let’s say that Paramount does win all the necessary approvals, and CNN and CBS are owned by the same company. There are a lot of great opportunities. I see a lot of potential. It makes a lot of sense, as both a viewer as well as an employee of CNN.
But nobody knows how it’s going to work. A lot of the news coverage this week has revolved around what that might look like. There were reports Tuesday morning about Paramount trying to bring in a business-side partner for Bari Weiss.
I think there are some reasons to be skeptical of those stories. But it just shows the amount of uncertainty that exists right now about what that post-merger landscape looks like.
