Media: A plot to ‘murder’ ‘60 Minutes’?

In this dark moment, “Scott Pelley is the hero we need,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At a recent all-hands meeting with Nick Bilton, new executive producer of 60 Minutes, the veteran CBS correspondent demanded Bilton explain the “Black Thursday” massacre, in which correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired along with other senior staff. When Bilton claimed ignorance, Pelley took him “to the woodshed.” He accused Bilton and Bari Weiss—the Free Press founder now running CBS News—of trying to “murder” 60 Minutes as a favor to President Trump, who has a long-standing grudge against the show. Not coincidentally, CBS’s billionaire owners, Larry and David Ellison, need Trump’s approval to complete their takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, home of CNN and the Warner movie studio. Bilton swiftly fired Pelley, but failed to silence him. Speaking later to The New York Times, Pelley debunked Weiss’ “ludicrous rationalizations” about revamping 60 Minutes for the digital age. (Viewership climbed 9% last season and online views 190%.) More damning, Pelley claimed that in February Weiss pushed him to impart a Trumpian spin to a report on anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, demanding he make the demonstrators look “more violent,” and inform viewers—falsely—that protester Renée Good was “driving toward” the ICE officer who shot her dead.

I’m sorry, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but no “employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed.” Even one who makes $7 million a year. Before last week’s blowup, Weiss and Bilton invited Pelley to clear the air in private. Pelley refused, preferring to humiliate Bilton before the full staff, which he did in deeply personal terms, mocking Bilton’s “slender” credentials and sneering that he “will never be welcome here.” There’s “something unconsciously fitting” about Pelley’s self-martyrdom, said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. In his “hysterical reaction” to Weiss’ changes to 60 Minutes, the 68-year-old Pelley displayed the pomposity and unreflecting, lefty self-righteousness that made those changes necessary.

Pelley’s not the only one getting old, said Chris Cillizza in his Substack newsletter. The average 60 Minutes viewer is now 65. The show’s audience is “literally dying off,” just as broadcast TV itself has entered terminal decline. Bilton tried explaining this during Pelley’s “barrage,” likening broadcast TV to “an ice cube that is melting.” In a prior memo to staff, Bilton claimed to have a “notebook full of ideas” of how 60 Minutes can thrive in a post-broadcast world, said Brian Stelter in CNN.com, and maybe he does. But if he and Weiss bungle the execution of those ideas as badly as they’ve bungled the last two weeks, many staff fear they’ll succeed only in “speeding up the melting process.”

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Maybe 60 Minutes will survive in some form, said Rick Wilson in his Substack newsletter. But its days as a beacon of “accountability journalism” effectively ended last year, when Weiss tried to scrap a report on El Salvador’s CECOT prison, then the Trump administration’s preferred destination for migrant deportees. True, David Ellison reached out this week to staff, promising to respect the show’s “editorial independence.” But with an autocrat in the White House, what sane billionaire wants to bankroll the work of asking questions that “make powerful people uncomfortable?” In our 250-year history, 60 Minutes’ “ticking stopwatch was the closest thing American power had to a conscience it could not buy. Until they did.”