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Don Hewitt, the founding father and longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, which is the most successful news program in US television history, sometimes used the word “tiger” to refer to the show’s correspondents—as in, “the tigers in my cages.” The show, which has been on the air since September of 1968, has managed to attract an enormous, loyal viewership by producing investigative journalism that frequently bares its claws. “I like to believe that my advertised toughness is directed not at drama but at uncovering something that’s worth uncovering,” Mike Wallace, one of Hewitt’s longtime correspondents, told E.J. Kahn Jr., of The New Yorker, in 1982. When Bari Weiss was installed as editor in chief of CBS News, last October, by David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount Skydance, she inherited a 60 Minutes with seven tigers in its cages. Now only three are left—making them something of an endangered species. 

On May 28, news broke that the program was firing the on-air correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega (another correspondent, Anderson Cooper, resigned earlier this year), as well as Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, and other senior leadership. CBS announced that Simon would be replaced by Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist and documentary producer, who had, like Weiss, no broadcast TV experience. Bilton promised in an interview that he was not being hired to water down reporting or placate the Trump administration. “There is nothing I love more than picking a fight,” he told Variety. When Bilton attended his first 60 Minutes meeting a few days later, he got one. Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent, grilled Bilton on his “slender” qualifications for the job and on the recent firings, which he said were “murdering 60 Minutes.” According to Status, when Bilton tried to deflect his tough questioning, Pelley said: “This is not the crowd to dodge.” The next day, Bilton fired Pelley, too.

The Bilton-Pelley bust-up has dominated media reporting in recent days. But the key question seems to be: Why, exactly, must 60 Minutes change? It is the top American news program, with an average of more than nine million people watching each Sunday, which Paramount itself was boasting about recently, and viewership increased by 9 percent for the most recent season. There has been “no stated reason” for the firings, Steve Kroft, the former 60 Minutes correspondent, told New York magazine. “I don’t think that there’s a plan in place; at least nobody’s been able to articulate it.” As Lowell Bergman, a former 60 Minutes producer whose own clashes with executives inspired the Hollywood film The Insider, put it in an interview with CJR’s Amos Barshad last week: “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.” 

As the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bilton now holds what has been—until recently—among the most coveted jobs in journalism. And yet Bilton, who is forty-nine and has the cropped stubble and stylish black-rimmed glasses common among the lanyard class, had, in fact, left the industry. “There was no part of me that wanted to come back to journalism,” he told Puck’s Dylan Byers. “But when Bari approached me about it, I couldn’t get it out of my head.” 

Bilton’s biography has been picked over by media reporters lately. He started at the New York Times, writing about technology, before joining Vanity Fair as a special correspondent, where, as several observers have been eager to point out, he was critical of the first Trump administration. He left the news business to join Hollywood—where he says he met Weiss—producing documentaries such as HBO’s Fake Famous and serving as a staff writer for HBO’s The Idol, as well as writing an apparently ongoing project for Martin Scorsese that stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. These pursuits have not always worked out. Back in 2014, Gawker’s Leah Finnegan described Bilton as “the worst New York Times columnist,” calling his writing “trite and stupid.” Nearly a decade later, in 2023, The Guardian would dub The Idol one of the worst shows ever made. (The Telegraph was less harsh: it was only the worst of the year.) As a report from Page Six put it last week, “A criticism of Bilton that emerges is that at a certain point in his career, he seems to have abandoned his mission as a journalist in an effort to join the elite crowd that he was supposed to be covering.” (A source close to Bilton strongly denied to Page Six that he had ever gone easy on the tech moguls he covered. For this article, a spokesman for CBS News did not respond to a comment request.) Bilton has seemingly been brought in—and will get paid a reported two and a half million dollars—to remake 60 Minutes for the Ellison age.

What, then, is the vision? Bilton told New York that he has “so many ideas” that he “cannot wait to bring to 60.” He said in a meeting that “broadcast is an ice cube that is melting,” which implies a desire to refreeze it—but in a memo to staff, he wrote: “I’m here to lead this show, not preserve it under glass.” He has said that 60 Minutes is “underutilized” by its hour-a-week prime-time slot—which suggests a plan for more of the storytelling it does best—while also describing his job as “rethinking how we tell stories in a completely new way.” Bilton called for the program to “expand,” apparently without irony, just after several longtime staffers were fired. All these Hollywood buzzwords bring us no closer to understanding why the new owners of the zoo are evicting their prized journalistic tigers—other than, apparently, we own it, so we can—which leads inescapably back to accusations of political timidity. In an interview with the Times, Pelley accused Weiss, as the head of CBS News, of “putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration.” Donald Trump has been a notable critic of Pelley, calling him part of a “gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”

It has been disheartening to see some media commentators uncritically accept the “60 must change” narrative. Brian Stelter, of CNN, which will probably become another asset of the Ellison family sometime this year, said that Weiss “believes the place is archaic and in desperate need of change, and she believes Bilton can help bring 60 Minutes into the digital future.” Okay. But is the place archaic? Is it in desperate need of change? Byers, of Puck, who said he knows Bilton (“he’s instinctive, aggressive, suspicious of concentrated wealth and power, deeply thoughtful”), wrote that “bravado is part of the culture at Bari’s CBS, where the mandate to modernize a declining linear product has become a catch-all justification for bold changes.” CBS News may have been declining, but 60 Minutes? The opposite. 

Pelley tried to get some answers. “I have many questions,” he said, according to Status, which obtained an audio recording of his confrontation with Bilton. “What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?” But Charles Forelle, a Weiss hire, intervened, calling him “rude” and saying, “This is not an interview.” Pelley said he was later told his behavior in that meeting amounted to a “firing offense.” That seems to be where we are now: A decade of Trumpism has meant that, in many of America’s powerful institutions, from the Pentagon to the Washington Post to the presidency, asking questions is interpreted as a hostile act. Powerful people barely feel the need to explain their actions. Accountability gets shut down. But, as Pelley put it over the weekend, “there is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done.”

For now, Bilton—who reportedly sent around a more conciliatory memo on Thursday, met with correspondents, and promoted Maria Gavrilovic, a longtime producer for Pelley, to a senior role—seems to have averted a mass walkout. In a statement, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim said they wanted to stay and fight for the soul of 60 Minutes, “because this is home.” (They also warned: “Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships.”) But, as Kroft said, the 60 Minutes they are fighting for—the one he knew, that was “unafraid to take on the government”—may already be dead.

Other Notable Stories… 

• For the Washington Post, a team of reporters—Suzan Haidamous, Meg Kelly, Scott Nover, and Mohamad El Chamaa—reconstructed the final hours of Amal Khalil, a Lebanese journalist who was killed by the Israeli military on April 22. “The first strike hit a car driving in front of her, the second destroyed her car as she hid nearby, and the third collapsed the building where she had taken shelter with another journalist,” they write. While Khalil was still alive, the Israeli military did not give the green light for rescuers to reach her; by the time they got approval, she was dead. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called her death a murder, defined as a targeted killing “in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work.”
  
• Donald Trump walked out of a Meet the Press interview that aired on Sunday on NBC, after facing questioning from Kristen Welker on his false claims that the 2020 presidential election and last week’s California primary had been rigged. After Welker said there was no evidence to support those claims, Trump responded: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.… Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough.”

• The Defense Department has designated its press office as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, making the space, long used by reporters and officials to meet, not just off-limits for journalists, but one of the most secretive spaces in the federal government. It’s the latest step in a long-running plan by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to constrain national security reporting. For a full accounting of the Pentagon’s efforts to force journalists out of the building, see Ivan L. Nagy’s timeline for CJR’s Access Issue.

• A federal judge blocked NOTUS, the political-news website started by Robert Allbritton, from rebranding as The Star last week, after the Washington Star filed a temporary restraining order in a trademark dispute. According to the Times, Dovid Efune, the publisher of the New York Sun, acquired the trademark for the Washington Star in 2024. Both outlets are seeking to fill the vacuum left by mass layoffs at the Post earlier this year (which CJR wrote about)—and you can read Adam Piore’s profile of NOTUS for CJR here.

• Jim Rutenberg, of the New York Times magazine, interviewed James Murdoch, who is set to acquire New York magazine and Vox for about three hundred million dollars. While his father Rupert’s “arrival in New York cast him as a villain to its journalistic establishment—a tag he wore proudly—James offers himself as a white hat, which his new reporting staff has greeted with a mix of hope and wariness,” Rutenberg writes. James Murdoch said he is building an “ideas business,” according to Rutenberg, adding: “If you’re just sitting there trying to get the clicks, then you’re feeding the lab rat cocaine in the corner of the cage.” 

• In the UK, two Romanian men were found guilty of involvement in a knife attack on a British Iranian journalist that is believed to have been carried out on behalf of the Iranian regime. Pouria Zeraati, a journalist for Iran International, a Farsi-language dissident broadcaster, was stabbed three times in the thigh outside his home in West London in March of 2024. (He survived.) Iran denied any involvement. But Iranian journalists based in London have told The Guardian they fear for their lives after a spate of similar threats and attacks. 

• And Alan Riding, a former Times correspondent who spent much of his career reporting from Central and South America, died on Saturday in a hospital in Paris, aged eighty-two. “His reporting could be exceedingly perceptive about the region’s conflicts,” Alan Cowell wrote for his Times obituary. Riding’s book And the Show Went On, from 2010, about life in Nazi-occupied Paris, explored “a teeming stage where loyalty and betrayal, food and hunger, love and death, found room to coexist, where even the line separating good and bad, résistants and collaborateurs, seemed to move with events.” Riding’s Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, from 1984, was recently republished with a new epilogue.

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