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One Saturday last October, Rome Hartman, a longtime 60 Minutes producer, was in a van hurtling up I-95 toward New York City when a promo for an upcoming segment arrived in his inbox for review. Hartman, in his late sixties, had the understated gravitas and silver hair of an anchorman, though he’d spent his career behind the scenes. Most of the time, he’d been at CBS, including as a White House producer and running the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric; he’d also launched BBC World News America and helped oversee Rock Center with Brian Williams at NBC. He is affable, a steady hand. When the email came in, he was returning from Washington, DC, where his colleague Bill Whitaker, the CBS correspondent, had just completed an interview with Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee.
Hartman, Whitaker, and a producer named Marc Lieberman rode together. They had a day to cut and polish the material before it was to air Monday night as a 60 Minutes election special. (Donald Trump had initially accepted an interview, as candidates from both parties had done with 60 Minutes since 1968, but then backed out.) In the teaser, taken from raw footage and slated to run the following morning on Face the Nation, Whitaker asked Harris why it appeared Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was “not listening” to the United States. “Well, Bill,” Harris replied, “the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.” Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, had already signed off. Hartman, Whitaker, and Lieberman did the same. Then they got back to work and forgot about it.
When the special appeared, Hartman was pleased. “Bill really did a masterful job,” he said. “And that was noted in the immediate coverage after it aired.” Trump felt differently. “I’ve never seen this before, but the producers of 60 Minutes sliced and diced (‘cut and pasted’) Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again,” he posted on Truth Social, his platform. It was “possibly illegal” and a “major Campaign Finance Violation,” he claimed. Trump accused Hartman and his team of deceptively editing the interview to make Harris look more presidential. He called for an immediate investigation and an apology.
Editing interviews for clarity and brevity is a common practice in television news. But soon Trump’s charges started to play on cable on a continuous loop, featuring the Face the Nation promo juxtaposed with the final cut, which included Harris saying, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” Hartman, now back home in Bethesda, Maryland, dismissed the controversy as “nonsense.” It was three weeks before the election, and polls were tight; he figured Trump was trying to change the subject. “This was not something that there were meetings about, or even phone calls about,” he told me, “because it was so laughable on its face.”
By Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission got roped in. Trump posted on Truth Social that the interview edit was “an UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL” and “a FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” and called on the FCC to “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” Jessica Rosenworcel, who was then the FCC chair, responded in a statement: “The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.” The following Wednesday, the Center for American Rights, a right-wing law firm, filed a formal complaint with the FCC accusing CBS News of “significant and intentional news distortion.” Trump announced that he planned to subpoena CBS records.
Hartman remained unruffled. “At first the feeling was ‘We’re not going to respond to something that’s so crazy,’” he said. But after two weeks, CBS issued a statement asserting that claims of “deceitful editing” were false and noting that “when we edit any interview, whether a politician, an athlete, or movie star, we strive to be clear, accurate and on point.” The portion of the Harris answer that appeared on the show “was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects,” the message went. Hartman wasn’t involved in drafting that language, he said, “but I agreed with it, for sure.”
By the end of the month, Trump’s lawyers had filed a ten-billion-dollar lawsuit against CBS in federal court, alleging “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” Hartman wasn’t terribly concerned about that, nor about the FCC drama. He was focused instead on an upcoming assignment about the restoration of Notre-Dame, for which he was negotiating access to Emmanuel Macron.
But then Trump won the election. Suddenly, there were new stakes for American media—and in particular for CBS, whose corporate parent, Paramount, was led by Shari Redstone. She had announced her intention to sell to an investor group led by David Ellison, son of the Oracle cofounder and Trump friend Larry Ellison. The deal, worth eight billion dollars, would merge Paramount with Skydance Media, David Ellison’s production company; Redstone was set to receive 1.75 billion dollars for her stake. Since CBS owned close to thirty stations, the deal required FCC approval. Soon, that agency would be under Trump’s control.
Before long, Hartman realized he had something to worry about. The second Trump administration would deliver an unprecedented level of deference from media leadership to a hostile president. Journalists at CBS News would come under increasing scrutiny. In mid-January, days before the inauguration, Hartman and his team were on their last day of shooting B-roll for a segment on Kentucky bourbon barrels—which are primed to impart flavor by having their insides set on fire: good TV. Then a report appeared from the Wall Street Journal: Paramount was considering settling with Trump, as FCC approval of the Skydance merger was not assured. When Hartman saw the news, he felt as though he’d been punched. “We all sat up and said, ‘Oh, this can’t be right,’” he recalled. “It was incredulity that the corporation could be even thinking about betraying us in this way—that the corporate parent of CBS was even thinking about considering settling a completely baseless and groundless lawsuit.”
Before Redstone and Ellison, there was Laurence Tisch. In 1986, Tisch, a billionaire who was the co-owner of the Loews Corporation—operating hotels, insurance providers, cigarette manufacturers, movie theaters, oil tankers, and other properties—was solicited to invest in CBS in order to save it from a series of hostile takeover attempts. Tisch joined the board with a minority stake; eventually, he became the chairman and chief executive. He was known for ruthless cost-cutting, which involved selling off parts of the company. (“He walked away with a couple billion dollars and destroyed a great corporation in the process,” Gene Jankowski, the president of CBS from 1977 to 1989, told me.) During Tisch’s tenure, the evening broadcast fell from first place in the ratings to third, where it remains today.
Tom Bettag, who was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather at the time, recalled a night he spent at Tisch’s place in Manhattan. Tisch had invited Bettag and a few news division colleagues for an intimate dinner. Not long after, Bettag said, his phone rang: Tisch, who was a longtime champion of Jewish causes, had just seen a broadcast that he felt had been a “bit harsh on Israel.” He suggested Bettag might want to do a segment that was a little nicer. Bettag, who is now a lecturer at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, remembered his reply: “Larry, if anybody knew that you called me and tried to influence what I’m doing on Israel, it would be a scandal,” he remembered saying. “I think we should just agree that you didn’t call me and I never had a call like that before.” Tisch, he said, backed off. (Tisch died in 2003.)
In the subsequent decades, what counts as a scandal seems to have changed, but the prospect of corporate intervention in news coverage has remained, including or sometimes especially when it comes to Israel. Last September, a week before the Harris 60 Minutes interview, the CEO was Redstone, and the scene was CBS Mornings. Ta-Nehisi Coates had come on to discuss his book The Message—which is about, among other things, race, identity, and conflict zones. As part of his reporting, Coates had visited the West Bank, where he described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “patently immoral.” Tony Dokoupil—a Mornings host, whose two children and ex-wife live in Israel—challenged Coates aggressively. He asked why Coates had not detailed “anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits” and suggested that the book would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
In the days following, Wendy McMahon, the president and CEO of CBS News, heard an outcry from staffers and viewers. At an editorial meeting, her deputy Adrienne Roark, the network’s president of editorial and newsgathering, promised to check biases, and told colleagues, “There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing. And we’re at a tipping point.” After a review of CBS reporting, including the Coates interview, she said, it was clear that some coverage had not met editorial standards—which, she noted, “has been addressed, and it will continue to be in the future.” Dokoupil’s coverage of Israel had raised repeated concerns; he met for an hour with members of the CBS News standards and practices team and the in-house Race and Culture Unit. (He declined to comment.)
Then Redstone chimed in. Redstone is an observant Jew whose philanthropic work has often centered on Israel and anti-Semitism; her ex-husband, Yitzhak Korff, and her son Tyler are both rabbis. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, “I wanted out,” she later told James B. Stewart, a journalist at the New York Times and the author, with Rachel Abrams, of Unscripted, a book on the Redstone family empire. That is: out of the box that media owners like Tisch had been expected to stay in. “I wanted to support Israel and address issues around anti-Semitism and racism,” as she put it. Last fall, she spoke up at a panel hosted by Advertising Week. CBS had made a “bad mistake” in reprimanding Dokoupil, she said. “I think Tony did a great job with that interview. I think he handled himself and showed the world and modeled what civil discourse is. He showed that there was accountability, that there is a system of checks and balances, and frankly, I was very proud of the work that he did.” She added, “We all agree that this was not handled correctly, and we all agree that something needs to be done. I don’t have editorial control. I am not an executive, but I have a voice.” (A spokesperson for Redstone declined to comment.)
That her rebuke was public was unusual—but it was not the first time she had used her voice, as it turned out. In the following days, the Journal reported that she had complained to CBS leadership about a Face the Nation broadcast that she felt had been unfairly critical of Israel after one of its strikes killed seven aid workers in Gaza, and that she had sent around clips from other media outlets “as examples of what she felt was balanced coverage.” CBS declined to comment for this story, and staffers were not granted permission to speak, but several current and former employees talked with me on the condition of anonymity. One said that Redstone frequently raised general concerns about wanting more conservative figures on air, because she felt the network leaned liberal.
By this time, the thousand-plus staffers of CBS News had plenty of experience compartmentalizing internal distractions. Lately, as the streaming era sped the decline of network-news viewership, CBS had been roiled by a series of operatic plot twists; boardroom drama and leadership changes accompanied budget cuts and downsizing. Turnover has not been unique to CBS News, but between 2018 and 2024 it’s had five presidents. (It’s now on its sixth and may soon get its seventh.) Employees have been asked to do more with less. “When the executive producers are stable, the people underneath them can really just keep their heads down and do their work,” a former high-level person at CBS told me. But when a show’s boss goes, the person said, “that is destabilizing for the entire broadcast.”
After the Dokoupil episode, Redstone placed a spotlight back on 60 Minutes. In January, a segment detailed dissension within the State Department over the way the Biden administration handled the war in Gaza. The show featured two former officials who had resigned over US policy and a third who accused Washington of complicity in possible violations of international law. The piece featured pictures of a dead baby, killed in an Israeli air strike, among other devastating images. “There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the US, because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane,” Josh Paul, a former director of the department’s political and military affairs bureau, told Cecilia Vega, the 60 Minutes correspondent. When the team cued up the segment in the 60 Minutes screening room for a final look, Owens, the executive producer, said, “Here we go, everybody ready? Who would have thought this is the piece that would get me fired?” All in the room burst out in laughter.
Once the episode aired, it was denounced by the American Jewish Committee, along with other supporters of Israel, for focusing on the horrors of the war instead of the October 7 Hamas attack. Some criticism also pointed to its lack of response or mention of any request for comment from the Israeli military. Initially, inside 60 Minutes, the critiques were easy to dismiss: “That story was a whistleblower story against the US government,” a senior 60 Minutes producer who worked on the story told me. “Every time the Anti-Defamation League, Big Pharma, or any lobby starts jumping up and down and screaming, they’re the loudest voice in the room.”
But Redstone, who was in Israel at the time, contacted George Cheeks, the president and chief executive of CBS, upset and demanding immediate action. (She wondered if Trump’s lawsuit against CBS could be helpful in achieving the “balance” she craved, as the Times reported: “Part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done.”) Within a day, to address “feedback regarding perceived bias,” CBS announced a new position, an executive editor overseeing journalistic standards and practices: “In today’s fast-moving news environment, it is critical for newsrooms to quickly and effectively deliver balanced, accurate, fair, and timely reporting, including highly complex, sensitive issues like the war in the Middle East.” It was a role that Cheeks and McMahon had previously discussed—but as sources told me, Redstone’s complaints accelerated its realization.
To fill the position on an interim basis, Cheeks appointed Susan Zirinsky—a CBS eminence who had been president of the news division, popularly known as the inspiration for Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News. “Shari trusts Susan,” a CBS executive told me. They had known each other for years. Last fall, Zirinsky—whose documentary company, See It Now Studios, has a production agreement with Paramount—released We Will Dance Again, a film chronicling October 7. Critics noted that it lacked a Palestinian point of view; for the opening sequence, Zirinsky wrote a disclaimer: “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.” Redstone attended a special screening ahead of the streaming premiere. When Zirinsky stepped into the newly established position, Redstone gave an exclusive comment to Jewish Insider: “I am pleased that CBS News recognized the need to take action to deliver consistently balanced and fair coverage.”
Zirinsky had plenty of journalistic credibility among the staff. She was also known to have had some conflict with Owens; both had been in contention for the 60 Minutes job. Apart from that, though, Owens was troubled by the terms of the role that Zirinsky had now been asked to fill. “She’s literally a spy for the owner,” a veteran 60 Minutes staffer told me. “It’s about corporate interference.” When McMahon informed Owens of the arrangement, he said he wouldn’t work with Zirinsky. But 60 Minutes had always had a network vice president in charge of standards in the room, and all agreed that the seat could be filled by Al Ortiz, a longtime CBS journalist, whom the staff respected. Zirinsky didn’t have to be there.
At first, Owens thought he’d evaded her direct oversight. But in the weeks that followed, the dynamics changed. Ortiz began calling Owens, a person familiar with the situation told me, reciting a list of questions that he hadn’t asked when they were together in the screening room. When Owens asked Ortiz where these queries were coming from, the person said, Ortiz replied that he was relaying notes from Zirinsky, who had been reviewing material on her own. The questions concerned a variety of subjects, including Trump and Gaza. Zirinsky defended her role as that of a guard against potential vulnerabilities in coverage, though some journalists at CBS viewed the situation otherwise, as their reporting repeatedly came under challenge. Ultimately, she answered to Cheeks and, at times, she was conferring directly with Redstone. “They were all flabbergasted,” a 60 Minutes veteran said of the staff.
As merger talks advanced, Redstone grew increasingly outspoken. Michael J. Socolow—a former broadcast journalist, now a media historian at the University of Maine—observed that the complex of internal pressures, and the accompanying public scrutiny, were “more intense” than that which journalists have had to endure in the past. “And,” he said, “it occurred at a time when far fewer people are watching the newscast, which means that they don’t carry the cultural power they once did.”
When the story broke that Paramount was considering a settlement with Trump, “everybody at 60 Minutes was reading the same thing and worrying in the same way,” Hartman told me. “Everybody kept working on their projects. But clearly there were conversations when we said to one another, ‘Can you believe that this is happening, or may happen? We sure hope this doesn’t happen, and is there anything we should be doing internally to try to prevent it from happening?’ No, there wasn’t anything we could do. It was a moment of peril created by Shari Redstone.”
ABC News had already caved to Trump in a libel case: in December, the company agreed to pay a fifteen-million-dollar settlement to his presidential library, plus another million in legal fees. Trump’s suit against CBS, which he’d since upped to twenty billion dollars, was filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, in Amarillo, where the lone federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, had been appointed by Trump and spent years as an advocate for conservative causes. Lawyers generally viewed the case as frivolous, but in Redstone’s view, it set traps: through the process of discovery, Trump’s attorneys could pore over footage and communications at CBS News—which she’d already called biased.
In February, Owens called a special meeting to address the 60 Minutes staff. “The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done,” he said. Brendan Carr, the new chair of the FCC, had requested an unedited transcript and camera feeds of the Harris interview, Owens told colleagues, and he planned to provide them. “The edit is perfectly fine,” he said. “Let’s put that to bed so we can get on with our lives.” Hartman supported the decision: “I had no problem with that because I knew that it would demonstrate what we had been saying all along—that there was nothing to the claims and nothing to the lawsuit.” Still, the possibility of a settlement loomed. The staff discussed options: public statements, a walkout, mass resignation. Anderson Cooper chimed in. “What would that accomplish?” he wondered aloud, according to someone present. “People will be waiting right behind for these jobs. The best thing we can do is keep putting out a great show.” Owens agreed. (A 60 Minutes spokesperson said the show declined to comment.)
In March, Paramount brought in Tom Cibrowski, a former executive at ABC, as the president and executive editor of CBS News, reporting to McMahon. 60 Minutes carried on with robust coverage, including an April 13 show that was critical of Trump’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and of Trump’s Greenland gambit. Afterward, Trump again attacked 60 Minutes on Truth Social, calling on Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment.” The post rattled Redstone, who requested a briefing from Cheeks on any politically sensitive segments 60 Minutes had planned for the remainder of the season. She asked, too, about the frequency of stories on Trump and his policies, whether some could be delayed until after the merger closed. Cheeks floated the idea of preempting the 60 Minutes season finale with an NFL Draft special.
“They were trying to control or stop us from reporting,” a journalist at the network said. “Once we were reporting, then they were trying to get involved in the editing process of it all, change the tone.” For instance, after the Vega episode, when 60 Minutes was working on a piece about Gaza, a producer said that a message came down from the executive level, asking, “Why would you do another Gaza story?” No segment was killed or reference to Trump removed over reporters’ objections. But discussion about those possibilities, along with the general pressure from CBS leadership, “was literally hand-to-hand combat every day,” a journalist said. (Another person familiar with the circumstances disputed this characterization, and said that the notes were gentle.) During a conversation with McMahon, as she enumerated questions and demands, Owens finally decided that he’d had enough.
He informed the staff in a hastily arranged meeting. “It’s clear that I’ve become the problem—I’m the corporation’s problem,” he said. The show was on “a really slippery slope” now that it had “a minder.” He sent a memo around, expanding on his decision to resign: “Over the past months,” he wrote, “it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
Hartman was stunned. “I think people really did believe, and still do, that he was doing it in a selfless way,” he said. “He was basically sacrificing his own career in an attempt to save the program that he loves.” Some colleagues again suggested, in meetings and privately, a mass resignation. Owens urged them not to: in leaving, he’d say, he was trying to create a big enough blast radius to call attention to corporate interference so the show could continue.
Scott Pelley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, addressed the news on air: “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” That summation was appended to a piece on Trump’s targeting of law firms, which a lawyer was quoted as comparing to “the way in which a Mob boss intimidates people.” Trump’s reaction was swift. His attorneys threatened to file a new lawsuit against the show and the network, accusing it of defamation.
Owens hung around for a couple more weeks to meet with the staff. Tanya Simon, a second-generation 60 Minutes veteran, was named his successor (first on an interim basis, which then became permanent). “There was a real rallying around Tanya, who had to carry through and finish the season strong, and I remember conversations with correspondents and junior colleagues where that shared determination was expressed,” Hartman said. “They had a show to put on that week, and Bill’s suddenly gone, and everybody in support staff and everything else said, ‘All right, we’re going to get on with it.’”
The season finale of 60 Minutes aired on May 18. The next day, McMahon announced that she, too, would resign, informing the staff in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” By that point, corporate executives had been asking that stories be counted for the number of mentions of Trump’s name. As with Owens, the wider impression was that Paramount had forced her out. After Hartman heard the news, he asked for a meeting with her, to express his disappointment. “I knew she was under a lot of pressure,” he said. “I was grateful for how she had fought for 60 Minutes.” Cibrowski now sat atop CBS News, and would report directly to Cheeks.
In July, Paramount agreed to pay sixteen million dollars to settle the Harris lawsuit. As with the ABC settlement, the funds would go toward Trump’s presidential library and legal fees. “I was blown away,” Redstone, who had stepped away from the negotiations for her own legal protection, later told the Times. She’d been expecting the payout to be higher. The feelings of the news division rank and file were perhaps best summed up by Stephen Colbert, who weighed in during the opening monologue of The Late Show on CBS: “I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: it’s Big Fat Bribe,” he said. “As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I’m offended, and I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company.” Within days, Paramount announced it was canceling Colbert’s show—and days after that, the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger. (The FCC did not respond to my request for comment on whether the settlement and Colbert’s firing were required or affected the decision to sign off on the merger. A spokesperson for Redstone declined to comment.)
Hartman and his wife were on a bicycle trip in Normandy when he received a text from a journalist informing him of the settlement and asking for his reaction to the news. His first response was to exhale. “I knew it was coming,” he told me. “I was relieved that it had finally happened, because we had to get rid of the people that had been running the place”—that is, the corporation—“and that had betrayed us.”
A certain clarity had revealed itself in the sequence of events: journalists, lawyers, and elected officials described the circumstances variously as a quid pro quo, a surrender, and a “dark day” for journalism. Less clear were the details of David Ellison’s efforts to secure the deal. Trump—whose former agent Ari Emanuel helped Ellison make his case to the White House that the merger should proceed—declared that he’d been promised twenty million dollars in airtime for advertising, public service announcements, and other programming that would advance his interests. There is no record of that in FCC filings; according to the Times, a Skydance lawyer told executives that it was “unmitigated false bullshit.” But Skydance has not publicly denied Trump’s claim, and the company did not respond to my requests for comment.
Ellison did make some firm commitments to the FCC that would subject CBS News to heightened scrutiny: A promise that the network would ensure “unbiased journalism” and that “editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.” CBS would get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and create a new ombudsman position to review “any complaints of bias or other concerns.” Later, the company announced that the ombudsman would be Kenneth R. Weinstein—a former president and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a public policy think tank that has received funding from the Koch family, and an adviser to the Trump administration. Previously, Weinstein served as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, now known as the United States Agency for Global Media. Under a new process, complaints are to be directed to him for review, and he may raise concerns with Jeff Shell, the president of Paramount, as well as with Cheeks. “After assessing the complaint, and if they collectively determine that such outreach is necessary,” according to a Paramount press release, “Weinstein, Shell, and Cheeks will address the complaint with the President and Executive Editor of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, who will recommend and implement any necessary action steps.”
At the start of August, Ellison introduced “Paramount, a Skydance Corporation,” praising CBS News, including 60 Minutes, for its commitment to “accuracy, integrity, and public trust.” Then he visited the CBS News headquarters in Manhattan with Cheeks by his side. They stopped by a 9am editorial meeting and met with news executives, including Simon. Ellison was also greeted by 60 Minutes’ Whitaker, Cooper, and Lesley Stahl, and projected a show of support to the wider staff.
Then Ellison appeared on CNBC, where he extolled the legacy of Walter Cronkite, that paragon of trust in journalism and CBS, and attempted to defuse concerns over the ombudsman role. “It is a vehicle for transparency, not oversight,” he said. “It basically is a way for both external—and internally, for people to provide feedback. And then that gets reported up to the president of Paramount, Jeff Shell. It doesn’t get reported anywhere else.” He added, “We don’t intend to politicize the company.” Be that as it may, Cronkite, it should be remembered, anchored the news when William Paley was in charge of CBS—and that relationship was hardly nonpolitical. Paley, who built CBS from a small radio network and oversaw the creation of 60 Minutes, pressured Cronkite to cut coverage dramatically during the Watergate scandal.
Socolow—whose father, Sanford Socolow, served as a top-level producer of the CBS Evening News at the time—described “Richard Nixon’s White House constantly calling Paley.” As he told me, “there’s always been tremendous political pressure on these networks where the ownership and the top management has been threatened by the president and the administrations. The big difference is the old-line ownership like Paley and Stanton”—Frank Stanton, a long-serving president of CBS—“would stand up to it, and would protect the news division. Today it’s not nearly at that level.”
Days into the new corporation, Ellison also announced that there would be some two billion dollars of cuts. That led to noisy murmurs about the fate of CBS Mornings, which has seen its viewership drop by 10 percent since 2024, and 19 percent in the key advertising demographic of twenty-five to fifty-four. The show averages 1.813 million viewers, far behind NBC’s Today (2.405 million) and ABC’s Good Morning America (2.498 million). Across CBS News, journalists feared what their fates could hold—especially if they were to be pulled into an unpleasant conversation with Weinstein, who once wrote a column describing Trump as “the ultimate outsider—a bold businessman who asks uncomfortable questions that typical policymakers are too squeamish to ask.” (“You have to wonder,” one said, “is CBS News even in control of its own product?”) Trump weighed in, telling reporters of Ellison, “He’ll do a great job.”
Ellison, who is forty-two, was recently described by the Jewish Post as part of “the next generation of global Jewish leadership.” The piece—which was appended by a note: “This article was written in cooperation with SkyDance”—grouped him with Brandon Korff, one of Redstone’s sons. They “love Israel, are connected to their Judaism, have Zionist values, and it’s very encouraging to see that in such successful families, the values are passed on to the younger generations,” the story went. “Both quietly donate quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF.” The elder Ellison is reportedly close with Netanyahu; according to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, Larry Ellison offered to help him with his legal representation when he faced domestic criminal prosecution, and Netanyahu wanted Ellison to buy Israeli media outlets.
The connections are notable. “There’s obviously always been an anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel media bias,” said Laila Al-Arian, a Palestinian American executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning investigative documentary show on Al Jazeera English. “But this takes it to another level. They’re outwardly pro-Israel. It’s a priority in terms of their passions and concerns. Journalism is supposed to be about following the facts where they lead, documenting history as it unfolds, holding power to account.”
So it seemed fitting, perhaps, when word got around that Skydance was engaged in talks to acquire the Free Press, cofounded by Bari Weiss—who, according to the Financial Times, “won over Ellison partly by taking a pro-Israel stance.” Weiss, a former Journal and Times writer who is also widely known for her outspoken critiques of media “wokeism,” is expected to be appointed to a high-level role in the news division, with editorial oversight. “She’s not a reporter; she’s never been in the field,” a 60 Minutes producer told me. “Talk about controversies—that’s going to be the person in charge of CBS.” A former CBS executive said, “In the objective fact-based journalism business, I don’t know how you believe you can continue to do that work with any sort of real seriousness when you’re surrounded by a corporation that continues to sacrifice the very thing that you are meant to be in the business of.” (Weiss did not respond to requests for comment.)
Bettag, the former CBS Evening News executive producer, sees another, more basic reason for concern. “When you are a CEO, you’re used to being able to say, ‘I own this place, I’m the boss, and I’m going to tell you what to do,’” he told me. “And I think Ellison, he’s used to one-man rule. So whether it’s Israel or whether it’s because he thinks that there are Trump issues, he’s apt to do what Larry Tisch did, and just pick up the phone and say, I want you to do this, unthinkingly. And not realizing that, with the news division, you can’t do that.”
Even so, as 60 Minutes readies for its fall season premiere, the show has promised to carry on with coverage as usual. Some veterans in the news division suggested to me that Trump’s attacks may have backfired. Said one: “This is an opinion, but I’ve worked in this area for a long time, and 60 became very political.” That is: “They couldn’t speak out against the lawsuit because we were in ongoing litigation. So they were almost speaking through their show. But if you look at what 60 has done traditionally over the decades that has been on the air, there wasn’t a political piece all the time.” (A 60 Minutes producer disputed that premise, considering the present circumstances to be unlike anything “that has ever happened in the federal government since the Civil War.”)
Among the segments in production: A piece on armed conflicts in Colombia, another on Ukraine, and one on a Trump family business. The upcoming season will also feature Hartman’s last story: a feature on a music school where a piano instructor is teaching children about composition. Hartman had felt the lure of retirement even before he started work on the Harris episode; this past August, he turned seventy. “My wife and I just decided that it was time,” he said. He believes, or hopes, that for his colleagues, the worst is behind them. “There’s no reason to believe the quality of the journalism they produce will decline,” he said. “I don’t want to be—I am not—pessimistic.”
Many at CBS News are exhausted, relieved that Redstone is gone, and eager to move on. That has not been easy to do. Recently, the network announced that, in light of complaints from the Trump administration over an appearance by Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, Face the Nation would stop editing taped interviews. When I heard from CBS journalists, they were disheartened: it was hard for them to see that as anything other than a capitulation. That, combined with the Weinstein hiring and the likelihood of Weiss’s arrival, has driven many at CBS News into a state of alarm. The network’s credibility will only continue to be tested—who will be left to defend their work? The job cuts, slated for November, loom ominously. 60 Minutes, for its part, has been financially stable, but nothing is assured. “If 60 Minutes continues to be one of the most profitable programs on American television, it will continue to be insulated and have some protection,” Socolow said. “If it doesn’t, it won’t. It’s that simple.”
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