CBS’s 60 Minutes was once the gold standard for TV network investigative reporting. Of course, that was back when NBC’s Saturday Night Live was actually a comedy show in the 1980s, and it even made people laugh. Since then, both shows have survived mostly by reputation. Some people continue to tune in, looking for a spark of that long-lost magic these shows once had.
In the case of 60 Minutes, it tends to try to do biased investigative work during Republican administrations, and it takes four or eight years off if a Democrat is in the White House. When Republicans are in exile, the program becomes less an investigative operation and more a propaganda channel for the government.
This is now-retired 60 Minutes presenter Steve Kroft pretty much telling you how soft he went on Barack Obama when he first arrived on the scene.
Contrast that with another 60 Minutes personality, Lesley Stahl, describing the exact same scenario, only with candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
Notice that Kroft’s intention was only to introduce Obama in a positive light. He makes that clear by what he does not mention. He seems to assume that he, as a reporter for 60 Minutes, knew what was expected. He didn’t need to be told. Stahl, on the other hand, also knew what was expected of her by all sides, and that Trump’s wishes were the least of her concerns.
Kroft’s report on Obama was a puff piece. Stahl’s resulting report on Trump was a biased “investigative” piece passing as journalism. This is the 60 Minutes you know and love.
More recently, there is a new sheriff in town in the form of Paramount Skydance owning CBS, and Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News. The new owners hired her to turn things around at the flailing network, and a decided part of that was to move the editorial tone of things closer to the middle.
Needless to say, she’s had her work cut out for her since Day One. Case in point, whether or not you’ve ever heard of Sharyn Alfonsi, she happens to be a current 60 Minutes propagandist, who, among other things, doesn’t seem to know the difference between self-righteousness and insubordination.
Before we get into the details, let’s examine that difference. If you’re a self-righteous journalist and you truly have a sense of honor and integrity, when you have an issue with your bosses, take it up with them behind closed doors. If that doesn’t work, and you feel the need to go public with your grievances, then quit before you go public. That’s the selfless and honorable thing to do.
However, if you have a problem with your boss, or your boss’s boss, and you go public with your grievances while still in their employ, that makes you an immature, insubordinate, entitled child. It certainly doesn’t make you a warrior for the truth or for journalism, and it doesn’t make you a victim. You haven’t lost anything yet, and you haven’t willingly sacrificed. Nothing courageous about that.
According to Alfonsi, earlier this year, Weiss “spiked” Alfonsi’s story that was about to air on CECOT, the famous Salvadorian prison that, unlike American prisons, treats criminals the way they ought to be treated, like they need to be punished for what they did. For the record, the Alfonsi story did eventually air, just not when it was first scheduled.
After initially not getting a satisfactory response from CBS News management on this, she, reflexively, it seems, penned a pretty nasty internal email to her 60 Minutes colleagues. That email was leaked to the general media. Are you surprised?
Here is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her ‘60 Minutes’ colleagues in full: pic.twitter.com/ilGoSROQEs
— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) December 22, 2025
In it, Alfonsi lays out all the things she said her team did to ensure accurate and fair reporting. She recounts how she and her team followed existing internal review and approval protocols, such as running the report by Legal. She then concludes that if she and her team did all the right things, then the decision to kill the story could only have been political in order to win the favor of the Trump administration, which is friendly with the Salvadorian government.
It’s laughable to see that Alfonsi actually included some of the cliches and tropes in her email that she did. Like when she wrote, “If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.” And then she had the gall to add, “We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”
Then she went all holier-than-thou when she wrote, “We have a more and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”
She actually wrote that, and I have no doubt that she meant it. In that spirit, I have some questions for Alfonsi.
Why did 60 Minutes all but ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 presidential election? Is that how you fulfill your “professional obligation?” In 2020, when former Senate staffer Tara Reade came forward with stinging allegations of sexual assault against then-candidate Joe Biden, why didn’t 60 Minutes do an exhaustive investigation of that? Wouldn’t Reade be the “voiceless,” someone you could give voice to?
And don’t plead ignorance. 60 Minutes Australia did air a report on Tara Reade, but we all know Australians don’t vote in American elections, don’t we?
What about the time in 2021 when the Biden administration bungled the U.S. exit from Afghanistan so badly that 13 service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport? I didn’t see much of anything from 60 Minutes on that. Is it because that would have made the Biden administration look bad?
Then there’s this. It’s a report Sharyn Alfonsi herself did on the Biden administration’s failed border protection policies and enforcement efforts. To say it’s “fair” to Biden is an understatement. She sits and asks softball questions and engages in no follow-up or pushback when talking to Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Other stories you weren’t likely to see much of on 60 Minutes included the impact on people of the Biden inflationary policies. You didn’t see anything truly critical of the Biden vaccine policies and their impact on millions of Americans, their jobs, their businesses, and their finances. And that’s just the Biden years. We can find a similar list of taboo topics for 60 Minutes during the Obama years.
This is not some conspiracy theory. I’m not saying the Biden and Obama administrations overtly instructed 60 Minutes on what to cover, and what not to cover, or how to cover it. With leftist media, Democrat administrations don’t need to give instructions. 60 Minutes knows which side it’s on, and so it knows what to do.
But when the story is about the Trump administration, anything short of nailing the president of his allies to the wall is deemed a failure in leftist media. This then explains why Alfonsi talked openly about what I think is her insubordination over the CECOT story. She did so in remarks at the National Press Club in Washington on April 30, where she accepted the Ridenhour Courage Prize.
She said, “Sometimes the truth isn’t good for business, and sometimes you will be shown the door just for telling it,” adding, “Today, that same kind of ‘corporate calculation’ is happening in newsrooms across the country. Some executives are not asking, ‘Is the story true?’ They’re asking, ‘Is it good for business?'”
Then Alfonsi called out her own management on the CECOT story, where the network postponed the airing of her report for a later date, “I will not linger on the internal mechanics of the dust-up at CBS that led to our CECOT story being pulled, but we have to be honest about what it represents…It wasn’t an isolated editorial argument. In my view, it was the result of a more aggressive contagion: the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear. It’s hard to watch.”
With Alfonsi’s contract at the network set to expire, she told the audience that she feared her time at CBS was about to wrap up. She said all of this in public, at an awards event, without ever having told her own employer that she was going to get this award and give this speech. So I ask again: Is this self-righteous professionalism or insubordination?
Maybe Alfonsi won’t be fired outright with cause. Maybe, as Alfonsi herself hinted, she just won’t have her contract renewed. Either way, these are not consequences for doing your job as a reporter or an “investigative journalist.” These are consequences for when you think you’re bigger than your own employer and aren’t subject to their rules.
Such consequences don’t make you a victim, a martyr, or a hero. They make you a self-absorbed network “talent” who’s going to have a tough time replacing that 60 Minutes salary and team of underlings somewhere else.
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