It took less than a week for Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” to land in the middle of a very public fight between the staff of the award-winning CBS News program and his new bosses at the network.
Things were already tense between the staff and Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, when she ousted the show’s senior leadership and installed Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker with no broadcast news experience.
The shake-up on May 28 set off alarms among the investigative journalists at “60 Minutes,” famous for its competitive culture and long history of fighting with management.
Mr. Bilton’s first meeting with that “cage full of tigers,” as Don Hewitt, the show’s founder, once called the program and its journalists, drew some very sharp claws. The correspondent Scott Pelley attacked Mr. Bilton and Ms. Weiss, deriding his “slender qualifications” and accusing her of “murdering” the show.
CBS News fired Mr. Pelley the next day, and Mr. Bilton, 49, scrambled to contain the fallout with a statement proclaiming his commitment to journalistic independence. The question now is whether Mr. Bilton has the mettle to tame his crew and get it working in time for the new season in September.
A CBS spokesman declined to comment for this article.
‘An unconventional pick’
Mr. Bilton’s résumé looks vastly different from that of previous leaders of the nation’s most-watched news program. He has never worked in television news or managed a large staff.
Mr. Bilton started his career in design. Born in Britain and educated in New York City at The New School and the School of Visual Arts, he first worked in film and advertising.
He joined The New York Times in 2003 as a designer and researcher. An interest in technology led to a job writing The Times’s tech blog, Bits. He wrote a series of articles questioning the Federal Aviation Administration’s ban on the use of smartphones and Kindles during takeoff and landing, which helped lead the agency to change those rules.
“He’s not done TV, but he’s done storytelling,” said Larry Ingrassia, a former business editor at The Times, for whom Mr. Bilton worked. “He’s inquisitive. He’s creative. He’s entrepreneurial.”
“Is this an unconventional pick? Yes,” Mr. Ingrassia added. “Could it be an inspired pick? Yes.”
In one column, Mr. Bilton quoted a widely criticized anti-vaccine activist as a credible scientist. The Times issued an editors’ note and a correction. Mr. Bilton later acknowledged he had “screwed up.”
He left The Times to become a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he wrote about tech, business and culture. He has also written two best-selling books: “Hatching Twitter” and “American Kingpin,” about the creator of Silk Road, the online black market.
Recently, Mr. Bilton has focused on screenwriting and filmmaking, writing and directing the 2021 HBO documentary “Fake Famous,” executive producing the 2024 Netflix documentary “Biggest Heist Ever” and writing for the 2023 HBO series “The Idol,” starring the Weeknd.
Mr. Bilton also has a film and a book in development about the Hawaiian mafia in collaboration with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. (Martin Scorsese is set to direct the film.)
“Every time I’ve ended up in all these different roles,” Mr. Bilton said on a recent podcast, “I’m like, ‘Whoa, like how did I end up here?’ The mentality I always had was someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and go ‘Time to go,’ and so I’ve got to do all the stuff I want to do until that happens.”
‘A notebook full of ideas’
In a May 28 note to the “60 Minutes” staff, Mr. Bilton provided a few hints about his plans: “I’m here to lead this show, not preserve it under glass. That means honoring what works and being honest about what doesn’t. I have a notebook full of ideas.”
Staff members of “60 Minutes” were already in an uproar. They were incensed over the decision by Paramount, CBS’s parent company, last July to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit President Trump had filed over the editing of a 2024 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. And some were unhappy with the appointment of Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no television experience, to run CBS News.
‘A trying and difficult few days’
So it was no wonder that tensions boiled over on Monday during Mr. Bilton’s first meeting with his new staff. Mr. Pelley attacked his qualifications for the job and asked why he had accepted it “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Mr. Pelley was fired the next day.
Rumors swirled that the three remaining “60 Minutes” correspondents were considering leaving the show. Mr. Bilton went into damage control. He reached out to the trio, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, and took Ms. Stahl out to dinner. He wrote another memo to the staff pledging to keep the show independent.
That, the three correspondents said in an email, “went a long way,” and they committed to staying on. But they warned if the show lost its independence, “we leave.”
It had been a “trying and difficult few days,” Mr. Bilton said in his memo to the staff. He added:
“It’s been a hell of a week.”
Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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