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60 Minutes, CBS’s flagship news program, is in turmoil. Last week, CBS fired the show’s senior leadership and two prominent on-air correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The network also announced that Tanya Simon, who had been the show’s executive producer, will be replaced by Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist for the New York Times; Bilton has produced a few documentaries but has no television news experience. This week, Scott Pelley, one of 60 Minutes’ biggest stars, confronted Bilton in an all-staff meeting. Pelley told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for the job he was taking and accused Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder who was appointed to lead CBS News after the Ellison family’s takeover of the network last summer, of “murdering” the show. The next day, Bilton fired Pelley, writing, “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.”

Lowell Bergman, a former 60 Minutes producer, famously survived his own workplace drama. In events that would be depicted in The Insider, Michael Mann’s acclaimed 1999 film, Bergman clashed with CBS management over corporate interference in his reporting on the tobacco industry. This week, Bergman told me that the kind of all-hands meetings in which Pelley and Bilton had their confrontation was rare at 60 Minutes. He did recall one, which took place during the tobacco saga, when Lesley Stahl took on Don Hewitt, the creator and former head of the program. “It was very memorable,” Bergman said. “Lesley Stahl got up and said some things that Don Hewitt was very unhappy about. But she didn’t get fired.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AB: What’s your reaction to the upheaval at 60 Minutes?

LB: Well, it doesn’t surprise me. Many people have pointed out—and apparently Scott Pelley did so in the conversation with Bilton—the people chosen don’t have the kind of background that you would expect to be in positions of authority. The worst things that people feared would be happening, they’re happening. Sure, Scott Pelley can be confrontational sometimes. That plays on TV, by the way. But my understanding is he was asking direct questions. 

Pelley reportedly said Weiss was “murdering” 60 Minutes. Do you agree?

I don’t know if she is murdering the place. We don’t know for sure what’s going on behind the scenes. Paramount is attempting to buy another major media conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, which may endanger CNN, which is not Donald Trump’s favorite outlet. So this all seems to be of a piece. 

I did an interview with The Daily last year just before the purchase of CBS. I’ll say the same thing I said then: there was a time, and I’m old enough to have worked during that time, where there were regulations in broadcasting that would have stopped all this from happening. 

Some observers have suggested that, rather than being a result of any active sabotaging, the upheaval at CBS is a by-product of Weiss’s incompetence. What do you think?

She’s clearly someone who wanted the job and thought that she was qualified for it. The bigger question is, why did the Ellison family and Larry Ellison himself put forth the money to buy the network—Paramount and its holdings, which included 60 Minutes, which was among the network’s most popular and most moneymaking programs—and immediately try to change it? They’ve never been in the business before. Ellison is a close friend and backer of Donald Trump, and all of a sudden he has a great interest in broadcasting. The behavior clearly is not designed to increase profits. I mean, they’re losing money by doing this. That’s not normal. 

Do you have any thoughts on Nick Bilton?

I don’t know him. The little I’ve heard about him, I don’t think he’s actually been involved in a news-breaking story in the edit room, and especially on a deadline. And clearly neither was Weiss, because of her behavior around the El Salvador segment she didn’t like. She’s learning. That’s an expensive learning bill. This may be the most expensive attempt to train people to do something in the history of broadcasting.

What does it take to break news on TV on deadline? What allowed you to do it well?

I don’t know that I always did it so well myself. But I know we could not have done it without a group of people who trusted each other. You’re talking about stories that have a potentially negative effect on individuals or even large groups of people. 60 Minutes is famous for doing those kinds of stories. In that kind of situation, you wanna make sure everyone knows what the hell they’re doing. It’s not a place to bring people who are learning on the job. You need to understand the process. You need to be, I would say, at least initially, somewhat humble about what’s going on.

How do you see the program moving forward in the short term?

They definitely have an uphill future. I’m worried for some of the people there that I know. There aren’t jobs like 60 Minutes available in the business. They just don’t exist. Where are these people gonna go? It’s a very difficult marketplace, particularly for any kind of reporting that involves criticizing not just the White House, but its allies in Big Tech. You don’t see a lot of that kind of reporting on the major streaming platforms. They’ve already self-censored. Amazon will do the Melania Trump documentary for forty million dollars. Is that journalism?

When Benjamin Netanyahu sat for a 60 Minutes interview, Weiss reportedly let him pick his interviewer. Would that have happened in your time?

That wouldn’t have happened in my time. The management was very aware of its turf, and the rules were pretty well written down or had long been a tradition. The executive producer got to choose which correspondent got the story.

There is some speculation that the remaining anchors will quit. 

Some of them are beyond qualified for retirement. I don’t know what anybody is planning to do; I haven’t had any conversations with anyone. It is a moment where, on the one hand, you might wanna tell people what you really think about the new management. On the other hand, some people are just saying, “Let’s go try and do a story and see what happens.” 

Have you been in touch with former colleagues at 60 Minutes? What’s this week been like for you guys?

There’s a couple of people I’m in touch with, but I’m so old, most people can’t talk anymore. The thing I do know: When you’re in this kind of situation, you feel alone, because you are alone. You don’t know who to trust. 

I’m sure there are some people who aren’t familiar with 60 Minutes and who are paying attention to the drama this week and wondering what all the fuss is about. How would you explain the program and its value to those people?

Well, it’s one of the last places in broadcasting with standards that have been maintained over a half a century. An audience will trust what they’re seeing and hearing on 60 Minutes. People are basically trying to preserve one of the last distributors of reliable information that has a large reach. What’s ironic is Donald Trump managed to get on 60 Minutes in the 1980s, and he still remembers it as a particularly important moment in his life. That legitimized him. He was at that point just a rich kid who was flamboyant and desperate for coverage, and he got it. 

Now the government of the United States has someone buying stations who has a personal relationship with the president of the United States. There’s no investigative reporting needed to understand what’s going on.

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