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When news broke yesterday that Bari Weiss, CBS News’s editor in chief, had ousted Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, I was shocked but not surprised. In addition to Simon and Alfonsi, Weiss fired Draggan Mihailovich, the show’s executive editor; Cecilia Vega, the first Latina correspondent; Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer; and Guy Campanile, a producer. “The arrogance, cruelty, and incompetence is stunning,” Alfonsi said to me, when I reached out to her about the news. 

The shake-up follows months of tension between Weiss and the 60 Minutes team, which erupted in December when Weiss abruptly pulled one of Alfonsi’s segments, a piece about a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. Alfonsi criticized the move at the time, writing in a note to colleagues that the decision, “after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” Despite Weiss’s request for more reporting, the segment eventually aired with relatively minor changes. 

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Alfonsi told the New York Times this week of her dismissal from the show. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.” Alfonsi, who had been with CBS News for a decade, was not known for stirring controversy. I worked closely with Alfonsi at ABC News and (full disclosure) consider her a friend. She is one of the most professional and levelheaded journalists I know. “They said that I was being difficult,” she said to the Times, “but I believed I was doing my job.”

Equally shocking is that Simon, who had been with 60 Minutes for almost thirty years and was extremely well-respected by the team, will be replaced by Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker with no broadcast TV or significant investigative experience. He will become the fifth executive producer in the nearly sixty-year history of the program. 

Here’s the backdrop against which this overhaul was made: 60 Minutes just wrapped a strong season, one that delivered compelling and essential investigative storytelling. The team covered the escalating war with Iran, the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, and Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of pardon power, as well as the rise of AI and suspected insider trading on prediction markets. In the end, the show had an average of 9.1 million viewers per episode and 2.5 billion video views on social media. In a farewell note to her staff, Simon wrote: “60 Minutes has always been more than just a broadcast: it is an institution built on independence, grit, and rigorous search for the truth. That is work we did together—and with ratings up 9% over last year no less.” 

“For 60 Minutes to lose the extraordinary leadership of Tanya Simon, with her decades of experience, is a real blow for the entire profession and for the kind of journalism that’s needed now more than ever,” Kyra Darnton, a longtime former producer for the show, told me. “The entire staff of 60 Minutes has always worked tirelessly to produce the highest-quality broadcast week after week. That’s not something that can be easily replaced.”

Weiss’s changes represent a remarkable gamble with one of the most valuable properties in American media—the equivalent of handing the reins of the Times to an unproven editor. 60 Minutes still regularly ranks as the number one program on all of TV, not just news. If Weiss’s moves fail and the ratings follow, this will go down as one of the worst decisions by a media executive in recent memory. It’s hard to imagine that’s the legacy Weiss is hoping to leave. Even so, the legacy left by Alfonsi, Simon, and the 60 Minutes team speaks for itself.

Last week, Jeff Bezos sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC and addressed criticism of recent layoffs at the Washington Post. “The Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” he said. He also reiterated that he has urged newsroom leadership to “follow the data.” It echoed the statement he made when brutal layoffs were announced in February: “Each and every day our readers give us a road map to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” 

So let’s follow the data, shall we? One of Bezos’s edicts has been that the Post’s opinion section should focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” I had a look at how one of the revamped section’s flagship projects is faring based on publicly available metrics.

Four months ago, the opinion section started a new video and podcast franchise called “Make It Make Sense.” A trailer for a new podcast, pinned atop the Post Opinions account on X, which has more than 108,000 followers, garnered ten likes and seven comments, all of them negative. The show’s dedicated YouTube channel has 670 subscribers and averages 844 views per upload. A video from this week about Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York and one of the new opinion board’s favorite topics, has fifty-seven views. (A sample insight from the guest: “It has been incredible to hear some people say exactly what an Iranian ministry would say.”)

By comparison, the Post’s main YouTube channel has nearly three million subscribers and averages roughly sixty-eight thousand views per video. A former senior leader on the video team told me that before the team was gutted in the layoffs, the Post published eight to ten videos a day. This month, it has published just two. The same source estimates the team is now down to three people, from a peak of roughly seventy-five a few years ago. “I don’t believe that they were following the data. I think they were following Jeff Bezos’s mandate,” the former senior leader told me. A spokesperson for the Post declined a request for comment.

The resources afforded the new venture have “raised eyebrows,” according to a recent report in Status. The Post built a “newly renovated opinion studio outfitted with fresh couches, extensive new video equipment, a bar setup, and the kind of natural wood-paneled backdrop increasingly favored by podcasters and creators.” A source told Status that the video equipment alone cost eighty thousand dollars. A journalist who used to work on Post Reports, the paper’s previous daily podcast, which averaged three million downloads a month, told me that Status story was especially galling. The journalist said that they had repeatedly asked Matt Murray, the executive editor, for additional resources for the program but, in a final meeting, Murray responded: “Those resources are never coming.”

Not only is the data underwhelming, the strategy is baffling. Why the project was not published on the Post’s main YouTube page, with its built-in audience, and where opinion videos were previously posted, is unclear. No decent digital strategist would recommend releasing a new editorial product on a YouTube page built entirely from scratch. “The podcasts follow zero of the best practices of YouTube or podcasting,” Jason Koebler of 404 Media recently wrote in a delightfully scathing piece. “The only indication that anyone involved has been on YouTube ever in their life are the podcast’s thumbnails, which are bad and weird in a different way entirely.” 

The material is also just plain bad and boring. As Parker Molloy recently put it in the New Republic, “The format is roughly what you’d expect if a print editorial board agreed to film one of its meetings without rehearsing first.” It’s a common misconception among struggling media executives that a weak facsimile of something that has worked elsewhere is good strategy. But if people want reactionary right-wing commentary, there are already plenty of popular options. 

The problem with the kind of person who says “follow the data” in journalism is that it often reveals a lack of editorial taste or talent. Data can be useful. It can offer information about what an audience wants. But it is not how something great gets made, something the audience might not even know it needs. “What’s so frustrating is that Bezos implied that the product was bad,” a former Post reporter told me upon hearing Bezos’s recent comments. “It’s the leadership and the business model that’s been the problem.”

A defining challenge of covering the Trump administration is the pace of the news cycle, in which significant stories are quickly overtaken by other important—and often equally alarming—events. One exception was the sustained national focus on immigration that followed the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown in Minnesota. But even as that level of attention inevitably receded, local newsrooms have continued to do the essential work of documenting what is still happening on the ground.

The latest example: a nightmarish story from Delaney Nolan for The Lens, in New Orleans, about a US citizen detained by ICE despite showing local authorities her state-issued ID and Social Security card. The woman, a Spanish-speaking mother of four, was stopped at a routine checkpoint in a residential neighborhood with her infant daughter. When agents declared both documents fake, she was handcuffed, shackled, and taken to an ICE processing center in southern Louisiana. Her child was left behind. 

What makes the story especially damning is how simple the verification should have been. The Lens was able to confirm the authenticity of the woman’s ID using Louisiana’s official digital credential app, a tool that would have been available to agents at the checkpoint. While she was detained, the woman “even provided additional paperwork from her phone, including tax documents for the IRS,” Nolan writes.

The woman was eventually released—eighteen hours after agents stopped her, following intervention from an immigration attorney. She has not received an explanation or apology. Instead, when Nolan reached out for comment, local authorities continued to insist the woman’s ID was fake. “She approached our deputies with her phony ID,” Chris Cormier, a staff sergeant with the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office, told The Lens. “She approached us, okay?” He also claimed that the woman “was already deported a time before.” 

“This is untrue,” as Nolan writes. “US citizens cannot be legally deported.”

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