Truth vs. Lies as '60 Minutes' Faces an Uncertain Future
Scott Pelley has received three Peabody Awards for his distinguished reporting. That didn’t matter to Bari Weiss, who fired him after axing numerous other 60 Minutes correspondents and producers. The goal: turning CBS into a pro-Trump megaphone.
Original photo by Flickr user Peabody Awards
Bari Weiss’ sole purpose at CBS News is to decimate the storied network and its flagship news program 60 Minutes — and replace them with Trump-friendly propaganda.
It’s not to “earn the trust” of CBS newsroom staff and viewers as Weiss claimed the day she took over as CBS editor in chief in January. That boat has long since sunk under a sea of betrayal.
So when Scott Pelley told newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton that Weiss was intent on “murdering 60 Minutes,” he was simply telling the truth — something Pelley has doggedly pursued in his 37 years as a CBS reporter, anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent.
Such truth has been in short supply inside Paramount “C” suites since David Ellison’s Skydance took over CBS’ parent company and installed Weiss as its Trump-approved content minder. The lying has gotten even worse in the months since the newly formed Paramount Skydance set its sights on another media mega-merger, this involving its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN’s parent company).
Mega-mergers’ first casualties
Such is often the case with media mergers of this scale: Truth and integrity are the first casualties in the billionaire-powered drive to seize control of ever larger slices of the American media market.
We’re not only seeing it as Paramount Skydance attempts to spin regulators on the illusory public-interest benefits of its massive acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. But the other colossal merger in play — Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna, which would form the largest television broadcaster in U.S. history — has been plagued by dubious claims both from the Trump administration and Nexstar’s top executives.
The raft of proposed media mega-mergers is the result of corporate decisions based on political considerations and billionaire interests, not what’s best for people. That kind of concentration of power limits accountability, undermines free expression and tilts coverage toward favoring a status quo of white supremacy and oligarchy.
As we’ve demonstrated at Free Press, winning official approval of such mergers comes with capitulation strings attached. Our sweeping 2025 investigation of the country’s 35 most prominent media conglomerates found that a hyper-commercialized and consolidated media system is structurally incapable of serving as an independent check against abuses from political and economic elites.
In the Trump era, consolidated media companies have done even worse: willfully serving as propagandists for a corrupt and bigoted regime while refusing to exercise their constitutionally protected right to speak truth to power.
So it was no surprise when Weiss powdered on a new layering of lies to justify Paramount Skydance’s decision to fire those who called out its dishonesty, claiming on the day of Pelley’s dismissal that the 60 Minutes correspondent had refused to “find a way back” from his earlier comments about Weiss. “I’m only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect,” she said.
Pelley was having none of it, accusing Weiss and other executives of being “openly hostile” when they met to discuss his concerns about CBS leadership. They had made no offer to find “a way back,” he said in a subsequent statement to the press.
“The staff of CBS News was misled,” Pelley added. “These executives cannot gain the trust of the staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for and reveals contempt for what journalists do.”
What journalists are supposed to do
Regardless of which version you choose to believe, the question remains: Find “a way back” to what? To being forced to ditch award-winning investigative reporting for a pro-Trump megaphone at the behest of Ellison and Weiss?
Caving to political and economic power is not getting back to “what journalists do.” At least, it’s not supposed to be.
The latest dust-up between Weiss and the 60 Minutes newsroom began when she fired Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two reporter-producers who had similarly questioned Weiss’ motives and experienced her attempts to inject political bias in stories. Weiss also axed Executive Producer Tanya Simon and other senior producers; correspondent Anderson Cooper had left the program earlier due to concerns over its direction. With only three of the program’s seven correspondents remaining, it seems likely that 60 Minutes lacks the capacity to air a show when it returns from its summer hiatus in September.
That’s good news for a certain occupant of the White House, who has long called for the destruction of 60 Minutes, and saw in Ellison’s hunger for merger approvals the means to get what he wants.
As Status’ Oliver Darcy and Natalie Korach write, the allegations from Pelley and other CBS reporters amount to “a brutal indictment of CBS News leadership from some of the most respected journalists in television news.”
With Pelley and Weiss offering competing versions of events, “they leave viewers who have trusted ‘60 Minutes’ for decades as the journalistic gold standard left to ask their own questions—starting with who’s telling the truth.”
If history is any guide, the answer is “not Bari Weiss.”