Bari Weiss is running the Trump playbook at “60 Minutes.” It goes like this: Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform — fairness, innovation, a new direction — and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket.
For years before she landed at CBS News in October, Weiss built a career criticizing ideological conformity and supposed institutional intolerance. Yet in her brief tenure atop the network’s news division, she has presided over exactly the kind of purge-and-replace operation that has become synonymous with Trumpism.
Donald Trump does not govern by expertise; he governs by loyalty and the elimination of dissent, filling critical posts with people whose chief qualification is that they will not tell him no. Weiss has imported this model into the most-watched program in American television.
For nearly 60 years, “60 Minutes” has stood apart because of its stubborn independence and commitment to irritating powerful people. The persistent, rhythmic ticking of the “60 Minutes” stopwatch is like the heartbeat of American investigative journalism. Week after week, the broadcast proved that uncompromising, adversarial reporting was not just a civic necessity but a commercially triumphant enterprise, regularly ranking as the number one program on all of television and drawing an average of 9.1 million viewers per episode. By virtually every traditional metric, “60 Minutes” was thriving.
Once inside, Weiss proceeded to surround herself with people whose resumes share her defining characteristic: print media backgrounds, no broadcast experience and an ideological comfort zone well within the current administration’s tolerance.
But Weiss has moved quickly to remake the institution in her image. She arrived at CBS News in October with no broadcast television experience, installed as editor-in-chief after Paramount’s merger with Skydance, the production company owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire and Trump loyalist Larry Ellison. Once inside, Weiss proceeded to surround herself with people whose resumes share her defining characteristic: print media backgrounds, no broadcast experience and an ideological comfort zone well within the current administration’s tolerance. She brought in Adam Rubenstein, a former New York Times and Free Press staffer, as deputy editor-in-chief, and tapped Charles Forelle, a former Wall Street Journal editor, as managing editor.
The final blow to the independence of “60 Minutes” came with a slate of firings announced May 28 that effectively purged CBS News’ talent. Among the departures are Tanya Simon, a 30-year veteran of the program who had stepped up following the departure of Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer who resigned in 2025 after concluding he no longer possessed the editorial independence necessary to do his job. Simon had guided the show to spectacular heights, overseeing a 9% increase in ratings during a year with negative headlines and leading an expansion that garnered 2.5 billion video views across social platforms.
While no specific reason for firing Simon was stated, the context brings some clarity. In May, all of the show’s correspondents reportedly wrote and signed a letter to Paramount co-CEO George Cheeks, asking him to officially name Simon as the show’s executive producer.
To replace a legendary producer like Simon, Weiss appointed Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist and documentary filmmaker who possesses no traditional broadcast journalism experience. Bilton’s defense of his own appointment mirrored the exact “fake it till you make it” ethos of the Trump administration. In a welcome memo to staffers that read at times like standard-issue Fox News pablum, he hollowly claimed a commitment to “fairness” and “holding power to account” — an insultingly tone-deaf statement given that his predecessor had just been terminated for doing precisely that.
Bilton’s vision for the future of the show sounds like a manifestation of tech-bro authoritarianism. In an interview with Semafor, he gushed over Ellison’s ownership, explicitly praising the idea of cross-department corporate synergy by comparing Paramount to Elon Musk’s corporate web, where artificial intelligence and battery technologies are shared between Tesla and SpaceX. Bilton told the Hollywood Reporter he also plans to modernize the show with “some of that kind of gonzo journalism stuff that I”ve done.” (In his 2021 documentary “Fake Famous,” he took three unknown people and attempted to transform them into social media influencers by fabricating an opulent lifestyle and buying followers on social media platforms.)
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
The firing of correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is where the Trumpist methodology becomes undeniable. Alfonsi had produced a segment on Venezuelans sent to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison. Weiss intervened, reportedly asking that the segment be changed to incorporate more of the Trump administration’s perspective. Alfonsi refused, arguing — correctly, as it turned out — that administration officials refused to appear on air and that any alteration would reflect poorly on the network. The Washington Post reported that in an April email to her team, Alfonsi had already named what was happening: Weiss was handing the administration a “kill switch” over coverage it didn’t like. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting,” Alfonsi told the New York Times of her firing. The segment ultimately aired weeks later, essentially unchanged, and without the administration interview Weiss had demanded. Alfonsi’s parting words to the Columbia Journalism Review perfectly summarized the nightmare unfolding at CBS: “The arrogance, cruelty, and incompetence is stunning.”
This is Trumpism’s signature move, applied to journalism — censorship by institutional capture, achieved by installing compliant leadership and then making clear that reporters who resist will lose their jobs. Cecilia Vega, the show’s first Latina correspondent, was also fired as part of the recent purge, even though her contract reportedly ran through March 2027. Vega claimed in her farewell statement that she had pushed back against “efforts to insert political bias into our stories” and “censorship, both imposed and self-driven.” CBS News denies the allegations.
Weiss, meanwhile, made a point of attending a private tribute dinner to Trump hosted by Paramount Skydance executives in Washington, D.C., on April 23 which included the president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — architect of the administration’s mass deportation policy — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. The event came as Paramount Skydance is awaiting federal approval from the Justice Department’s antitrust division for their bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery — and inverted the entire meaning of that tradition to mark the adversarial relationship between the press and power.
Weiss’ purge means that the upcoming 59th season of “60 Minutes” is slated for a drastic overhaul. The institutional memory of the network has been completely erased, replaced by a leadership team that views journalism not as a constitutional check on tyranny, but as a public relations wing for the ruling class. If Weiss’ track record at CBS holds — ratings are down at the “Evening News,” chaos has erupted at the morning shows, CBS Radio has been shuttered — the numbers will follow.
This morning, veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley apparently predicted the same. According to reporting from the New York Times, which obtained an audio recording of a Monday morning staff meeting attended by Bilton but not Weiss — a CBS executive said she was asked not to be present because of employees’ “ill feelings” about the recent purge — Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the show. “She does not love this place,” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Pelley also noted that Weiss “has no qualifications for her job,” and described Bilton’s credentials as “slender.”
This will go down as one of the most disastrous blunders by a media executive in recent memory: taking the number-one program on American television, a show that was growing its audience and generating real accountability journalism, and remaking it in the image of an administration that despises everything it stood for.
This article has been updated to include new reporting from the New York Times on CBS News’ Monday morning staff meeting, which featured a heated exchange between Nick Bilton and veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley.
