CBS News is the Titanic of broadcast news organizations. It's a century old, spans the globe, airs something like a dozen programs, and employs more than 10,000 — the most powerful all cut from the same ideological mold.
Steering that hulk away from the iceberg is no easy feat, but it's the assignment given to new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss by parent-company Paramount CEO David Ellison.
Weiss has been at the helm for less than a year, so I've been more than willing to cut her plenty of slack as she tries to steer the massive ship more toward the center. Results so far are mixed — and she was never going to make CBS News a conservative outlet — but both the institutional inertia and rot are formidable.
Perhaps nowhere is any of that more true than in CBS's prestige news program, the crown jewel of the company's investigative news tradition: 60 Minutes, now in its 58th season. The show's current lineup of hosts — I just can't bring myself to call them journalists — is a Who's Who of lefty infotainment propagandists, including Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, and Anderson Cooper.
Whatever you think of them professionally or personally, these are big names with iron rice bowls the size of a Mercedes-Maybach stretch limo.
Yet the New York Post reported late Thursday that Weiss has a "bloodbath" in store for the 60 Minutes team.
Earlier this year, Weiss — whose center-left ideology is too far to the right for many of her employees — took an axe to CBS Evening News, reducing headcount there by about 10%. Worse, she named what one anonymous staffer called a "mediocre straight white man" as the program's new anchor. The rest of us call him Tony Dokoupil, on the rare occasions when we remember that low-rated CBS Evening News is still a thing.
“They’re doing another round [of layoffs] in June," a CBS insider told the Post, "and ’60 Minutes’ people are on the list."
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“60 Minutes is a powerhouse program, and the probing, serious high-quality journalism that is its hallmark is vital to CBS News. We’re immensely excited about its future,” a spokesperson for the network told The Post.
“Bari wants to make the show harder,” one source told The Post. “No one is talking about ‘60 Minutes’ on Monday morning.”
That last part is key.
I'm (just) old enough to remember when 60 Minutes was simply what people watched on Sunday evenings, if they wanted to be thought of as informed — up to and including my rock-ribbed Republican grandparents. Culturally, 60 Minutes was such a juggernaut that Saturday Night Live could parody its biggest name (Mike Wallace) and the format, and everybody got the joke.
But that was a long time ago. 60 Minutes still generates profits, but the average age of the typical 60 Minutes viewer is "deceased."
The same source told the Post that Weiss "wants to put her stamp on 60 Minutes, and how you do that is you either get rid of the top producer or the top correspondent." But the show needs so much more than new faces.
If Weiss wants to make the show a juggernaut again, she'll have to do much more than trim staff. She'll have to figure out how to make the show relevant in the age of X and TikTok.
Middle-aged GenXers like me were in on the joke 40 years ago but stopped laughing — and watching — long ago. How will Weiss bring in even younger viewers?
The real "bloodbath" is what happens when the remaining viewership dies off.
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