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  "path": "/post/211114/staffers-bari-weiss-gutting-60-minutes",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-29T14:45:12.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Larry Ellison",
    "Keith Ellison",
    "CBS",
    "60 Minutes",
    "Bari Weiss",
    "notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison",
    "Status",
    "The New York Times",
    "butter up"
  ],
  "textContent": "CBS News chief Bari Weiss has hacked up _60 Minutes_ to the point that even show staffers have lost faith in the famed magazine show.\n\nWeiss’s recent shakeup at _60 Minutes_ has involved the exit of several of the show’s major personalities, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Correspondent Anderson Cooper left voluntarily.\n\nTo replace the top leadership, Weiss has installed former _Vanity Fair_ writer Nick Bilton, who, like her, has next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.\n\nBut _60 Minutes_ staffers don’t see Weiss’s aggressive restructuring as an optimistic new era for the program—instead, there’s a near-unanimous prediction that “it’s over.”\n\nStatus reported on the maelstrom behind the scenes, citing “more than half a dozen” staffers.\n\n“They’re gutting us,” one _60 Minutes_ employee told Status. “It’s over. I don’t see how ‘60’ will be able to function after this.”\n\n“Goodnight and good luck, motherfuckers,” they added.\n\nAnother senior staffer told Status that “everyone—100 percent thought Tanya and Draggan did exemplary jobs.”\n\n“It hurts. We feel violated,” the senior staffer said.\n\nWeiss’s tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.\n\nIn a statement shared with The New York Times, Vega said she “very much [fears] what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.”\n\n“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” Vega wrote. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.\n\n“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy,” the George Polk Award–winning journalist noted.\n\nBut CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was ready and willing to sacrifice _60 Minutes_ long before that. The media conglomerate undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Donald Trump over the show’s 2024 Kamala Harris interview, in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance.\n\nThat resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including _60 Minutes_ producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling Trump’s groundless lawsuit.\n\nOwens, who has largely remained out of the spotlight since leaving the show, shared his opinion on Weiss’s recent restructuring with Status. “They’re killing _60 Minutes,_ ” he said.",
  "title": "“It’s Over”: Staffers Reveal How Bari Weiss Is Gutting 60 Minutes"
}