CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley and his former colleague Sharyn Alfonsi say Bari Weiss is destroying “60 Minutes”, the most prestigious program in American television news. For more than half a century, the CBS newsmagazine has defined investigative television, drawing tens of millions of Sunday-night viewers with its ticking stopwatch, its ambush interviews, and a roster of correspondents treated as the closest thing American journalism has to royalty. Alfonsi warned late last month that “the wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down.”
Pelley went further yesterday, confronting Weiss’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, at a staff meeting. When Bilton told the room that Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” Pelley shot back that “she’s murdering 60 Minutes,” that “she does not love this place,” and that “she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.” Pelley told Bilton, a technology journalist, that he held “slender qualifications” for the job. Cecilia Vega, another ousted correspondent, framed Weiss’s firings as “censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” and “dangerous for democracy.”
But a review of the last two decades of “60 Minutes” by Public shows that the program has been inaccurate and partisan on many major issues, including the border, transgenderism, climate, species extinctions, Russiagate, and the Hunter Biden laptop.
