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Scott Pelley gets this week's Joseph N. Welch Award
Friends,
CBS Newsâs new Editor in Chief, Bari Weiss, recently announced in an email to staff that the network was parting ways with the showâs executive producer, Tanya Simon, and substituting Nick Bilton.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bilton said he was excited âto take what I believe is largely an unutilized news brand and take it into the modern age.â
Unutilized? Modern age?
At a time when broadcast news is in crisis, â60 Minutesâ is anything but. Itâs 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. â60 Minutesâ 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. Itâs the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.
This goes beyond âif it ainât broke âŠ.â
At a staff meeting yesterday, famed correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of âmurderingâ â60 Minutes,â according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded. (Scott Pelley gets this weekâs Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)
I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBSâs Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBSâs golden goose?
One hint: Besides chucking its executive producer, Weissâs has also cut ties with â60 Minutesâ correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
In December, Alfonsi challenged Weissâs decision to hold a â60 Minutesâ 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 âInside CECOT,â eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)
Alfonsi calls the networkâs decision to allow her contract to expire âa deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reportingâ that âsends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.â
Vega is no less blunt. âIn recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,â she said in a statement. âReporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussionsâŠ. Letâs call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.â
Of course itâs censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trumpâs assets to get Trumpâs FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.
Trumpâs âfingerprints and DNA are all over this,â veteran â60 Minutesâ correspondent Steve Croft says. âHeâs been making threats against 60 Minutes and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.â
Trump has fixated on â60 Minutesâ 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 â60 Minutesâ aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, he said CBS âshould lose their license.â
This much is clear. CBS is being âmurdered,â as correspondent Scott Pelley calls whatâs happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, â60 Minutesâ is a goldmine. Politically, itâs dangerous as hell to Trump.
Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone whoâs been fired from â60 Minutesâ knows this. Trumpâs lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.
You need to know this.
â60 Minutesâ â the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history â is being dismantled because Trump doesnât want America to know the truth.
Trumpâs increasingly corrupt political system â rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful â 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 Americaâs first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.
One day we will look back on the murder of â60 Minutesâ as one of the travesties of Trumpâs despicable reign.
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â60 Minutesâ â the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history â is being dismantled because Trump doesnât want America to know the truth.
