Turmoil at ’60 Minutes’ after Pelley and two others are fired | The Excerpt

On the Monday, June 8, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: For over 50 years, CBS’ legendary “60 Minutes” has been a stalwart of the investigative reporting tradition. But a recent shakeup to leadership and on-air talent by new CBS News new Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has some questioning the future of the stories newsmagazine. CNN’s Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter joins The Excerpt to dig into the issues plaguing CBS News in this moment and what it means for the future of “60 Minutes.”

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Zulekha Nathoo:

For over 50 years, CBS's legendary 60 Minutes has been a stalwart of the investigative reporting tradition, but a recent shakeup to leadership and on-air talent may put that reputation and future at risk. Behind the changes is CBS News's new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist, who left The Gray Lady to found The Free Press, a digital publication that is broadly described as featuring contrarian and conservative viewpoints.

Last fall, CBS News under the leadership of newly minted CEO David Ellison acquired The Free Press for a deal estimated at $150 million. And after the deal closed, he put Bari Weiss, a successful entrepreneur with no broadcast experience, in charge of CBS News. Will Weiss's radical approach usher in a new age of prosperity for the storied network, or will it lead to its demise?

Hello, and and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Zulekha Nathoo, filling in for Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, June 8th, 2026. Here to dig into the issues plaguing CBS News in this moment and what it means for the rest of the TV news industry, I'm now joined by CNN's Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter. Brian, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

Brian Stelter:

Hi. Thank you.

Zulekha Nathoo:

So catch us up, if you don't mind, just on the latest shakeup at the news magazine 60 Minutes. What happened?

Brian Stelter:

A lot has happened. I would say it's been the most tumultuous period in 60 Minutes' history, and that's a grand history that goes back many decades. This was the pioneering news magazine on American television dating back to the days almost of black and white TV. And now, in 2026, it is still the most popular, highest-rated news magazine out there, known for those hard-hitting investigations and adventures.

CBS News under Bari Weiss is trying to drag this show into the digital age. If you talk to Weiss's inner circle, they say the show needs renovation, it needs overhaul, it needs new thinking, outside energy. But the staffers there, the correspondents who have been fired, many CBS news veterans say that this is really troubling, unsettling, maybe even politically motivated. And it's all complicated by the fact that CBS parent company Paramount is trying to buy CNN and the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery right now. That's a media mega merger that needs Trump administration approval.

So there's a political cloud hanging over this entire story, and I acknowledge as a reporter at CNN covering this, I'm covering a story about my potential future employer. So that's my full disclosure right here. But I've been calling sources inside CBS, trying to cover this story as objectively as possible, and there is a really interesting divide. Some people inside CBS think all this drama is about politics, but management insists that it's not. Management, the Weiss allies at CBS, they say this is about changing the culture at 60 Minutes, not about politics at all.

Zulekha Nathoo:

Well, let's talk a little bit about that division because some viewers are vowing not to watch 60 Minutes anymore. How do you think this division will affect the show?

Brian Stelter:

Yeah, there's definitely a loss of trust right now. In this particular moment, this summer, there has been a severe rupture, and that's partly because of the way that these firings were carried out. So let's go back in time a little bit more than a week. 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon was dismissed, along with a couple of other top producers and two correspondents that viewers know well. Those correspondents were Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. They were both fired. Well, in Alfonsi's case, her contract was not renewed. So you had this overhaul at 60 Minutes that really incensed Scott Pelley and then Scott Pelley spoke out about it in a staff meeting. Then he was fired as a result.

So you have this house cleaning that's happened at 60 Minutes. It's made national news. And I think your question is spot on. A lot of viewers, a lot of listeners have heard about this and now they're more skeptical. They're wondering what's going on. They might not be as trusting of 60 Minutes in the future. It's going to be a big challenge for Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, and for Bari Weiss, the boss, to figure out ways to win trust back because that T word, trust, is ultimately what this is all about.

Because I think the one thing everybody agrees on is that 60 Minutes is a really valuable property. And it has those decades of history I talked about. It has a really strong reputation among so many millions of Americans. This is in some ways another story. It's the kind of story USA Today's been telling and CNN's been telling for more than a year now, an American institution under pressure in the Trump era. This is a very familiar story. This institution happens to be a news magazine that does really great reporting.

But I know that there are many allies of Bari Weiss. There are many CBS news leaders who do feel like the show is out of date, that it's archaic, that it's way too insular. 60 Minute staffers have always been proud of that idea that they're insular, that they are autonomous, that they're not really a part of CBS News, that they operate on their own, that they have so much freedom. Those can be really valuable qualities, but I can also understand why from the management point of view, they'd like to integrate 60 Minutes with the rest of the place. Why they'd like to have 60 Minutes making not just horizontal video, but a lot more vertical video, the kind that we all watch on our phones.

So there are good reasons to try to affect change at 60 Minutes. Honestly, there are a lot of good reasons. But the way it's been done and the charges of political motivations, those are what have really hurt trust in the last week or so.

Zulekha Nathoo:

And it's a tough situation because as you mentioned, 60 Minutes has and continues to be a very attractive program for CBS. In 2024 and in 2025, ad revenue is between 67 and 69 million just for listeners at home, and viewership this season is up nine percent according to Variety, and Paramount puts the average viewers at nine million per show. So what was CBS's logic behind the shakeup?

Brian Stelter:

Right. What you're getting at is the show's not broken. So why are you trying to fix it if it doesn't seem broken? Yes, the ratings were up nine percent this season. The counter argument is that the 60 Minutes lead-in for most of the season is the best lead-in in television. TV is all about the program that's on before it. And so your lead-in is the program that's on before you, and 60 Minutes for most of the season has the NFL right before 60 Minutes. That's the best lead-in in television. Everybody's watching football on Sunday afternoons and then many stay for 60 Minutes. The NFL ratings were up about 11%. So that helps contextualize the 60 Minutes ratings being up nine percent.

But hey, up is up. In an environment where much of broadcast is down or flat, up is up. So why change it? Why try to fix something that's not broken? Well, I think number one, what I hear from Weiss's allies, and I say this by the way, I keep saying Bari Weiss allies because on the record, she has not said the kind of thing she is saying in private. On the record, she has talked about cherishing the 60 Minutes legacy and moving into the future. But in private, she is much more candid about what she views as an archaic institution, a place that's stubborn and resistant to change with correspondents who might be too sanctimonious and might be out of touch in 2026.

She definitely wants to bring in outside energy. She feels that's necessary. That's why she hired this guy, Nick Bilton, who has no TV experience. I used to work with him at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. He has lots of reporting experience, but not traditional 60 Minutes experience. So she's bringing in outsiders because she believes that's going to strengthen the show.

And then what Bilton and Weiss both believe, and I think we get to the core of this entire story, is something they said to staffers right after Bilton was hired and the others were fired. What they said was, "If you don't disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted." Now, I don't know about you, but I think that sounds like something straight out of Silicon Valley. It sounds like a tech industry slogan, the kind that Bilton knows really well from his years covering companies like Twitter and Google and Apple.

And I can totally understand the appeal of it. It sounds like a really interesting way to think about the world. But the whole Facebook ethos of move fast and break things, while it might be really tantalizing, it can also end up breaking a lot of stuff. I mean, when you apply that to journalism, trust and ethics and all of those qualities that we value can be endangered when you move fast and break things.

Zulekha Nathoo:

Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. What are the risks, in your opinion, that CBS now faces because of the changes?

Brian Stelter:

Yeah, there are many risks here and it's been true for all of Weiss's tenure. She was brought in by Paramount CEO David Ellison last October with a mandate to shake things up at CBS and restore trust in media. That's a very tall order. That's a very big challenge for anyone in an environment where there's so much distrust of media.

And why is that? It's because we're all living in our own media bubbles. We all have our own personalized algorithmic experiences with media. We're all seeing different content in the algorithm. It's hard to know what to trust. It's hard to even know what is real. But she was brought in with a mandate for change and she's been executing on that, creating lots of controversies along the way. There's been a lot of bad press for CBS and all of that does risk eroding trust, but it's in the service she believes of trying to win trust back, of trying to appeal to the great middle of America, the great big audience out there that wants to know what is going on in the world.

So it's an understandable, worthwhile mission, but the way it's been acted on has gained a lot of scrutiny. You have a lot of TV news insiders who will say to you, "Weiss is doing some of the right things, but she's doing them the wrong way." There's talk about whether she will be installed atop CNN as well if Paramount wins this deal. And that gets to the political issue here, and that's the other big risk. This cloud hangs over everything. I mentioned it earlier. Many liberals, many progressives in this country believe that CBS is going to the right to appease President Trump.

I would argue if you actually watch or listen to what's on CBS, it hasn't changed that much. Yes, they canceled Stephen Colbert's show, but they renewed Jon Stewart's contract at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart's just as much of a Trump critic as Steven Colbert. So CBS is complicated and the moves are complicated.

The content has not changed that much in terms of the aggressive news coverage that CBS is known for, but there's definitely a perception that Paramount has tried to cozy up to Trump and there is some truth to that perception. The corporate interests at Paramount have tried to align themselves with the Trump administration while trying to get a merger approved by the administration. So all of that stuff, all of that complexity, it gets layered on top of the journalists at CBS News who are just trying to do their jobs. It's not just a risk, it's a big challenge for the news division.

Zulekha Nathoo:

Yeah, it can be a heavy burden for all of them. I know one of the big questions is whether it will matter. Is there an audience, a younger audience out there for TV news anymore? So what do you think the relationship is between 60 Minutes and the American people? What do you think the public's relationship will look like after this?

Brian Stelter:

The answer to your point about young people is yes. I think that young people, just like everybody else, no matter your demographic, want to know what is going on in the world, are interested in the people that are in power or interested in the people making choices that affect all of us. But that audience, that younger audience, is probably mostly going to be watching on YouTube or watching on their phones.

So Bari Weiss, Nick Bilton, they want to make more content directed and delivered to that audience. But I would also just observe to you that some of the most interesting content we're seeing on YouTube nowadays is longer form news and longer form documentary coverage. It actually looks a lot like 60 Minutes. So again, it goes back to that idea of the model's not broken. Does it need fixing? So that gets to the idea that the model might not be broken, so why try to fix it?

But broadly speaking, 60 Minutes, its relationship to the public, it's valuable to have these institutions that still reach a mass audience. I would say that's true for USA Today and for CNN as well. It's valuable to have brands that are trying to speak to everyone, that are trying to be broad, that are trying to be fair to all involved and are trying to take people to places they don't ordinarily get to go. That's part of the magic of 60 Minutes as well. So whether it's 60 Minutes climbing Mount Everest or investigating the impact of Trump administration budget cuts, that has real impact and real power and real value for the audience. And every source I have at CBS, every veteran staffer, every former person who's concerned right now, they all just want to make sure that that gets preserved in some way.

Zulekha Nathoo:

And we want to make it clear to our viewers and listeners that CBS News is a very well respected news operation in the industry. It was the home of such heavy hitters as Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite, reporters who truly defined what deeply reported TV news could aspire to. Big picture here, is this an existential crisis for the CBS News Division? And if so, how can they recover?

Brian Stelter:

It's always challenging when you're trying to broaden out or appeal to more people, trying to make changes that are going to expand your audience when you run the risk of alienating your current audience while doing that. CBS is going through a version of that challenge right now. The political clouds make that even harder.

Ultimately, though, any news division in the country, any large news division, and for that matter, any local news outlet, has to evolve with the times, has to remain relevant and figure out ways to reach tomorrow's viewer as well as today's viewer. So I sympathize with these bosses, and not just [inaudible 00:14:32] at CBS. I mean, in general, within this changing media environment can be very difficult to figure out what balance to strike as you try to win over new audiences without alienating your current audience.

Zulekha Nathoo:

And we reached out to CBS News for comment, but as of this recording, we have not heard back. Brian, always a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Brian Stelter:

Thank you.

Zulekha Nathoo:

Thanks for listening to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Zulekha Nathoo. If you enjoy today's show, we hope you'll like the episode and subscribe. It helps more people find The Excerpt.