Fears that controversial CBS News head Bari Weiss would dismantle the network’s venerable “60 Minutes” news magazine at the conclusion of the most recent season grew on Thursday.
According to reports from the New York Post and the New York Times, another newcomer with no traditional broadcast news background, like Weiss, was tabbed to be the show’s new executive producer, with several longtime staffers and executives from the show being shown the door.
The CBS News editor-in-chief’s sweeping Thursday overhaul, described by the Post as a “bloodbath,” removed executive producer Tanya Simon, senior executive producer Draggan Mihailovich, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega — all longtime staffers at the iconic newsmagazine that has dominated Sunday night television for nearly 60 years.
Newcomer Nick Bilton, a former New York Times columnist, will become only the fifth executive producer in “60 Minutes” history — making him one of the few leaders of the program without deep roots in broadcast journalism, according to the Post.
The gutting of the program’s leadership comes despite “60 Minutes” finishing the current season as the top-rated weekly newsmagazine on television, with viewership up 9 percent from the prior year, according to Nielsen data. The program remains appointment viewing for millions every Sunday night, The Times is reporting.
Weiss’s tenure has already been marked by editorial interference and internal turmoil. Last year, she delayed broadcasting a story on a Salvadoran prison shortly before air, eventually allowing it to run only after Trump administration comments were appended to the piece.
Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, one of those purged Thursday, told The New York Times this week that CBS News “was no longer separating editorial independence from corporate interests” — a direct indictment of Weiss’s stewardship
In an interview with the Times, Bilton dismissed the mounting criticism surrounding his appointment and the program’s overhaul as “just noise,” attributing it to “routine fallout spurred by disruption at a legacy business.” He predicted the “end result” of his changes would be “quite frankly phenomenal.”
He defended his lack of broadcast news experience by invoking the program’s founder. “Look at Don Hewitt and how he came up with the idea for this. He loved documentaries, but he did not have the patience to watch two-hour long versions of them. So he came up with ’60 Minutes,’ which was a series of short documentaries,” Bilton said.
The Times report added Bilton is relocating from Los Angeles to New York, and claimed he plans to emphasize stories beyond the weekly broadcast and experiment with “new voices from outside traditional broadcast news.”
“When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes. I’m not saying that we’re going to change the show completely and drastically. I’m saying that there are all these approaches and ideas that we can do that I couldn’t be more excited to jump into,” Bilton said.
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