The real story behind the 'murder' of 60 Minutes

CBS News’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, recently announced in an email to staff a major shakeup of the revered broadcast, starting with the removal of “60 Minutes” executive producer, Tanya Simon, for Nick Bilton, who has no experience producing a television news show.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bilton said he was excited “to take what I believe is largely an unutilized news brand and take it into the modern age.”

Unutilized? Modern age?

“60 Minutes” is 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. “60 Minutes” 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 gold mine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.

This goes beyond “if it ain’t broke ….”

At a staff meeting yesterday, famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded. (Scott Pelley gets this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)

I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?

One hint: Besides chucking its executive producer, Weiss has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” producers Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

In December, Alfonsi challenged Weiss’s decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on an El Salvador maximum-security prison where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, including alleged gang members. Weiss had raised concerns about the comment-seeking process and determined that it needed additional reporting. Alfonsi termed the decision a political move. (The segment, called “Inside CECOT,” eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)

Alfonsi calls the network’s decision now to allow her contract to expire “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” that “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”

Vega is no less blunt. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”

Of course it’s censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trump’s assets to get Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.

Trump’s “fingerprints and DNA are all over this,” veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft says. “He’s been making threats against ‘60 Minutes’ and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”

Trump has fixated on “60 Minutes,” 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 had been edited in such a way as to hurt his presidential campaign. After “60 Minutes” aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, Trump said CBS “should lose their license.”

This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as correspondent Scott Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a gold mine. Politically, Trump thinks it’s dangerous as hell because it tells the truth about him and his regime, and wants it killed.

Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone who’s been fired from “60 Minutes” knows this. Trump’s lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.

You need to know this.

“60 Minutes” — the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history — is being dismantled because Trump doesn’t want America to know the truth.

It’s the same reason CBS canned Stephen Colbert — because Trump hated Colbert’s truth-telling humor about him.

It’s important to see all this as a systematic effort by Trump to silence the truth about what he’s doing to America.

Trump’s increasingly corruption — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing an increasingly corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaires and multibillionaires, 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 America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.

One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s despicable reign.

In the meantime, boycott CBS.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.