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  "path": "/post/211794/ex-60-minutes-staff-bari-weiss",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-12T19:25:17.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "CBS",
    "CBS News",
    "Paramount",
    "David Ellison",
    "Bari Weiss",
    "60 Minutes",
    "notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison",
    "canned",
    "contentious staff meeting",
    "Variety"
  ],
  "textContent": "Bari Weiss has ripped _60 Minutes_ to shreds—and earned a venomous reputation amongst the show’s various contributors and producers as a result.\n\nChange at the investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former _Vanity Fair_ columnist with no television broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.\n\nThe following week, Scott Pelley—the de facto face of CBS News—was canned after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious staff meeting.\n\nFormer staffers of the investigative news program have since sounded off on Weiss’s chaotic takeover and her heavy hand in restructuring the show.\n\n“We have to acknowledge that _60 Minutes_ needed a bit of a facelift, and there were potentially positive ways to improve the program, but it’s the way they have gone about it,” one former staffer told Variety. “You don’t give a facelift with a fucking machete.”\n\nRome Hartman, who worked as a producer on the show for 25 years, lamented the figurative arson of his “professional home,” and speculated that the show would only continue to decay under Weiss and Bilton’s direction.\n\n“Scott wasn’t shouting at him or physically intimidating the guy—he was doing exactly what he should’ve done in the best tradition of the best _60 Minutes_ correspondents,” Hartman told _Variety_. “And if Nick Bilton is such a snowflake that he can’t possibly tolerate a voice of challenge—and if Bari Weiss has to hide behind his skirts—that does not speak well of how he’s going to run the place or how she’s going to run the place.”\n\nBut she may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery—a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to 30-year _60 Minutes_ correspondent Steve Kroft.\n\n“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing _60 Minutes_ for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Kroft told Variety. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”",
  "title": "“Turned to Sh*t”: Ex-60 Minutes Staff Tear Into Bari Weiss’s Decisions"
}