Deceased Nag and Cudgel Alert: CBS News Edition

When CBS fired Scott Pelley last week, a logical assumption was that he had a substantial 401(k) or a standing offer to work elsewhere if his former gig went sideways. Perhaps both. The longtime CBS News and “60 Minutes” correspondent had to know that one doesn’t call out the new boss in front of colleagues without repercussions. 

Indeed, the consequences were swift, as the network turfed him one day after a contentious exchange at new chief Nick Bilton’s first staff meeting. Further details and Pelley’s own account of events reveal an even more dispiriting, if entirely predictable, situation. 

Bilton is the hand-picked choice of network news division head Bari Weiss to lead “60 Minutes.” Put another way, one unqualified, mediocre former New York Times columnist installed another to run the network’s premier news program. 

Last week’s intro staff meeting quickly devolved, according to multiple reports amid leaks from attendees, and lasted just 15 minutes before Bilton exited. Initial reporting said that Pelley interrupted Bilton’s opening monologue to say that Weiss was “murdering” the news magazine. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that," Pelley said in multiple reports in which outlets obtained audio of the meeting. Pelley added that both Weiss and Bilton are unqualified for their positions and that Bilton would “never be welcome here.” He asked Bilton why several senior staffers were fired the week prior. Bilton didn’t answer the question and responded that it wasn’t his decision (side note: journalists do not always adhere to standards to which they hold their subjects). A Weiss deputy and new CBS editor told Pelley that he was being rude. “This is not actually productive,” Charles Forelle said. “This is not an interview.” Pelley replied, “It’s working for me.” He added, “Anybody came into our house, this is ’60 Minutes.’ I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?” 

Bilton walked shortly thereafter. Pelley was fired the following day, and Bilton released a whiny, self-serving statement: “While I’m new to ‘60 Minutes,’ I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the ‘60 Minutes’ veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility – enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation – demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.” 

We’ll get to Bilton’s qualifications and career shortly. Pelley responded to Bilton’s remarks with a lengthy statement in which he said that new management was attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration. He lamented the loss of professionalism, experience and institutional knowledge due to those already fired. “For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over ‘60 Minutes’ interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.” 

Bilton’s claim that he’s devoted his career to investigative journalism is dubious, at best. At the New York Times, he was a design editor in the newsroom and a researcher, and later a forgettable columnist writing about technology issues. He moved to Vanity Fair a decade ago and tried to pass himself off as having been on the front lines of the story about Theranos, the fraudulent health tech company that landed founder Elizabeth Holmes in jail after bilking investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He lately devoted his time to making documentaries and collaborating with Martin Scorsese on a screenplay. Like Weiss, he has never worked in TV news, yet somehow was sold on the idea that overseeing the most venerated news magazine in TV history is a fine entry-level position. 

Pelley sat down with a New York Times reporter late last week and elaborated on the entire dust-up and his termination. He said that he and remaining staff were in shock after a handful of senior staffers were fired the week previously, without explanation, including the head of the show – a woman with decades of experience at the network and Emmy Awards on her resume who was given until the end of the workday to clear out her office. He was also put off by an introductory email that Bilton sent to staff in advance of the first meeting, in which he wrote that it’s no longer 1968 (the year “60 Minutes” went on the air), implying that the newsmag is stuck in the past, and seemed unaware that the show has been broadcast online, globally, for more than a decade and not just at 7 p.m. on Sundays. 

At the intro staff meeting, Pelley said that Bilton sat in front of the group and simply started to read a statement from his phone, a remarkably tone-deaf ice-breaker. Pelley felt compelled to speak up, he said, after he looked around the room and saw that he was the most senior staffer in attendance (age 68, with 37 years at CBS). As for the notion that he publicly berated the new boss, Pelley said that he believed the meeting was private and behind closed doors (subtract points for naivete, as every employee, disgruntled or otherwise, carries a portable recording device these days), and that “60 Minutes” DNA includes tension and hard questions. The next day he was called into the office, where a CBS news exec said he had committed a fireable offense and ended the meeting after 10 minutes. He said that he honestly didn't believe that he'd be fired (subtract more points for naivete). He learned later that day that he was canned. 

The shakeups and firings at CBS News and “60 Minutes” are dressed up as modernizing traditional storytelling and identifying new avenues of connection and communication. As the site’s media grump, I’ve yammered about much of this previously, but it’s worth repeating that it’s yet another big corporate thumb on the scale of independent journalism. CBS was bought by Skydance Media, whose leader, billionaire David Ellison, overpaid for Weiss’s media startup and then installed her as head of the network’s news division. Both Ellison and his dad, gazillionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, are Trump supporters and needed a compliant FCC to sign off on Skydance’s purchase of Paramount and CBS. Weiss alienated the room almost immediately by firing staffers, holding a “60 Minutes” piece on the notorious El Salvador prison where immigrants were sent, hosting a town hall with the widow of slain shit-stirrer Charlie Kirk, and inserting morning show haircut Tony Dokoupil as evening news anchor. She passes herself off as a centrist truth seeker, but her track record is right-wing sympathizer and Israel supporter who often targets mainstream media, “wokeness” and diversity initiatives. Now comes Bilton. 

Pelley said that both Weiss and Bilton are out of their depth. He likened it to being asked to fly a 747 with hundreds of passengers to Paris. “We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it,” Pelley said in the Times. “We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ‘60 Minutes’ before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

Breaking News, Part Next - Prose Poetry

The enshittification of Big Media continues apace. Or in other words, we again come not to praise but to Bari Weiss. And to offer an update about Washington Post owner and elfin arsonist Jeff Bezos. 

If cringe were sentient

Weiss, the recently installed, vastly unqualified head of CBS News oversees a network whose flagship news program, “60 Minutes,” aired a series of actor interviews on Sunday to “celebrate the movies” rather than report and assemble a piece on Federal law enforcement forces in Minneapolis and the violence against and death of U.S. citizens. Because how is a multi-million-dollar news organization with a small army of seasoned reporters and producers and camera people supposed to turn a story about the dominant event in our nation that quickly? 

On Monday, Weiss circulated a memo that there would be an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting Tuesday to discuss the future of the news organization. Speaking from experience, there has never been such a meeting, newsroom or probably anywhere else, that was worth a salamander’s shit. They were often masterclasses in corporate weasel speak about pivoting or re-prioritizing, with a side of layoffs or wage freezes or budget cuts; staff needed to do more with less and to work smarter, not harder. Unspoken was the fact that it would be more difficult and less pleasant to do your job. 

Weiss’s message Tuesday was heavy on “restoring trust in the media” and to emphasize streaming and to attract viewers through personalities and branding. She introduced a slew of new execs with titles that include “talent strategy” and “branding” and “development.” As for the newsroom’s ideological position, she said, “Our job is to present people with the fullest picture — and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue — and then trust them to make up their own minds.” 

Sounds good, yes? By all means, let’s find the strongest voices against vaccinations and in favor of warrantless stops and searches, and let people make up their own minds. Weiss, you might recall, alienated the newsroom almost from the jump when she turfed a bunch of veteran staffers and spiked a “60 Minutes” piece about the notorious El Salvador prison where U.S. officials sent detained migrants just hours before airtime. 

Real Muppets > Morning Show Muppet

She also installed morning show muppet Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the nightly CBS Evening News. He raised eyebrows almost immediately, and not in a good way, when he claimed that major media had missed on many stories and gave too much credence to advocates and elites and academics at the expense of the average American. He pledged to be “more accountable and more transparent than (Walter) Cronkite or anyone else of his era.” In one of his first broadcasts, he made no attempt at pushback or accountability in an interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the military raided and snatched Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, instead yielding the floor to Hegseth to yammer about peace through strength and to flatter President Trump. A Dokoupil “exclusive” interview with Trump at a Ford automotive plant in Michigan predictably went off the rails, with both practically shouting at each other over the clatter of a factory floor and the President gasbagging for much of the 12-minute segment. When Dokoupil asked about economic concerns, the President launched into hyperbolic orbit and floated the idea that Dokoupil owed his promotion to the last election. “A year-and-a-half ago, our country was dead,” Trump said. “We had a dead country. You wouldn’t have a job right now. If (Kamala Harris) got in, you probably wouldn’t have that job right now. Your boss is an amazing guy, (but) might be bust. I doubt it in his case, but you never know. Let me tell you, you wouldn’t have this job. You wouldn’t have this job, certainly whatever the hell they’re paying you. Our country is rocketing right now, we have the hottest country in the world. If (Democrats) got in, we would be Venezuela on steroids.” 

Bloviating aside, Trump hit upon a kernel of truth. Dokoupil’s big boss is billionaire Skydance Media prez David Ellison, son of gazillionaire and Oracle founder and Trump and Israel supporter Larry Ellison. If Trump had not been elected, maybe Skydance’s purchase of Paramount Global and CBS doesn’t make it past a Federal Communications Commission not helmed by a Trump loyalist. Ellison the Younger also overpaid for Weiss’s media outlet, then installed her as head of CBS News. If she weren’t head of the news division, Dokoupil would still be chopping it up weekday mornings with Gayle King and Nate Burleson. 

His resume’ includes a ham-handed attempt to scold author Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2024 for a chapter in his most recent book in which he criticizes Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. That earned him a reprimand from previous leadership but played well to Weiss, herself an Israel sympathizer and conservative irritant who passes herself off as a centrist and seeker of truth. 

Speaking of truth seeking, Bezos continues to neuter his once proud newspaper into irrelevance and to provide ample evidence of his political leanings. The paper announced just last week that it had suddenly pulled the plug on coverage of the Winter Olympics, an event that it typically floods with staffers. A dozen folks were credentialed and had of course already made travel arrangements, and reportedly $80,000 had been spent on lodging. The Post’s deciders walked back the decision a bit earlier this week and will now send four reporters to Milan. 

This comes on the heels of a decision not to send Washington Nationals beat writers to spring training and amid rumblings that massive layoffs are just around the corner. It’s no secret that the Post has been hemorrhaging subscribers and losing money, but it shouldn’t be a concern for a man whose reported net worth is $252 billion and who vowed to continue its mission when he purchased it in 2013. After all, he spent $55 million on his recent Venetian wedding and his Amazon MGM studio $75 million to bankroll the execrable documentary on Melania Trump that he himself pitched. 

But in recent years, Bezos has shifted the paper rightward. He killed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for President, contributed to Trump’s inauguration and had a better seat for the swearing in than Cabinet appointees. He circulated a memo last spring that said the Post’s editorial page would champion “personal liberties and free markets,” both of which he absurdly claimed are “underserved” in the current news and opinion climate. Now comes word that layoffs may number in the hundreds and could kneecap the sports department. Tough times for my former brothers and sisters in the newsgathering business. 

I get that it’s a different world and people seek and consume information in assorted ways. News organizations need to keep up with the times and explore all manner of delivery. However you dress up the package, though, no amount of “branding” or “development” changes the fact that reporting is time-consuming, tedious, challenging, stimulating and occasionally dangerous. It’s a skill that sometimes is an art, which too many people now in charge of newsrooms do not understand or appreciate as they chase viewers and profits. Weiss said as much to staffers, that if everybody “does their jobs right, in a year’s time CBS News will look very different.” Even setting aside the glaring question of what the “right” way is to do a job that didn’t previously exist or has not been done that way before, she is without a doubt correct.

Gheorghemas Media Interlude

We interrupt the holiday jollity to remind you that it was always a matter of when, not if. When CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Global, installed right-wing masseuse Bari Weiss as head of the news division this fall, staff anxiety spiked about how heavy-handed she would be and if she would permit the network’s veteran reporters and producers to do their jobs. 

Weiss inserted herself into the lineup recently when she hosted Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative mouthpiece and flamethrower Charlie Kirk, for a mostly forgettable CBS town hall short on both journalism and substance. Separately, longtime “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley said that the show had experienced “no corporate interference” thus far. Sunday evening, however, Weiss pulled a scheduled “60 Minutes” segment about the Trump administration’s practice of shipping immigrants to a notorious El Salvador prison known for torturing and abusing prisoners. 

Weiss said that the story needed additional reporting, which is standard newsroom practice, while correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi said the decision to pull the piece wasn’t “editorial” but “political.” In a note to colleagues obtained by multiple outlets, Alfonsi said that the story was screened five times and vetted by network attorneys and the company’s Standards and Practices department. Weiss said that she wanted Trump administration voices as part of the story. Alfonsi had sought to interview officials from the White House, State Department and Dept. of Homeland Security but none chose to discuss the subject. 

“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi wrote. Weiss said that the New York Times had already reported on the prison’s conditions and abuses, as if somehow that disqualified a venerated television news magazine from, ya know, doing its own reporting and talking to prisoners and victims on camera. Also, the most cruel and mendacious administration in our lifetime has pretty much forfeited any imprimatur of supposed balance or fairness, particularly if officials decline to talk. 

Apropos of nothing really

I speak from experience when I say that reporters can be thin-skinned and defensive about their stories, often believing them complete and above reproach. I can’t tell you the number of times editors improved my stuff by requiring extra voices or more reporting. That said, the 41-year-old Weiss is the furthest thing from a respected, veteran editor and steward. Her experience is mostly as a whiny, sloppy opinion writer who left the NY Times in a snit because she didn’t feel that she was sufficiently valued and then as a figurehead of a supposedly “independent” news startup bankrolled by mostly conservative money. 

You’d think that someone who publicly blasted the Times on her way out the door would be only too happy to plant a flag with visible, visceral images that the Gray Lady cannot match. Again, her justification rings hollow and is a tell on where she stands. Just beneath the surface of this newsroom taffy pull is billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions and the Orange Oaf’s ego. 

Paramount Global’s boss, David Ellison, is the son of gazillionaire Oracle co-founder and Trump supporter Larry Ellison. David Ellison and by extension, Weiss, have implemented layoffs and restructuring at CBS, including the insertion of a former Trump appointee and loyalist as the network’s ombudsman. Ellison the younger also seeks to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, though the prize is Warner Bros. movie and TV vaults. 

Get a load of these cartoon villains

The Warner Bros. board has urged shareholders to accept a $72-billion, cash-and-stock offer from streaming giant Netflix. But Ellison and his newly minted Paramount Skydance conglomerate are angling for a hostile takeover, sweetened by a promise from dad Larry to be personally responsible for $40.4 billion of equity financing that supposedly pushes their bid to $77.9 billion total. 

The Wall Street Journal also reported that David Ellison conveyed to Trump that if he and his compliant FCC do not approve the Netflix bid and instead sign off on the PSKY deal, he would overhaul CNN. Such a move would appeal to the president, since he still consumes cable news and has long viewed the network as unfairly critical. 

Per usual, everything with TFG is a transactional, zero-sum equation predicated on power – the diametric opposite of good governance. He enriches himself and gets his way because he sits in the Oval Office and has staffed his Cabinet and regulatory agencies and the courts with loyalists and suck-ups. He traffics in grievance and outrage at a time when media corporatization neuters, if not entirely removes, accountability. Compromised national news organizations such as CBS and, if it comes to pass, CNN further erodes any hope of an informed electorate and with it, a functioning democracy.

[Coda: In what could only be described as an entirely predictable outcome, Weiss's inexperience and incompetence came back to bite her and CBS, and she failed to consider the network's significant non-U.S. broadcast arrangements when she spiked the 60 Minutes story. Almost as if on cue, the full piece began airing via Canadian streaming outlets, and despite CBS' efforts to stop it, the full story is now widely available, including here. Weiss has "succeeded" in ensuring millions of people who wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to it will now see it. Well played.]

Black Eye for CBS

Turns out that former “60 Minutes” executive producer and CBS news hound Bill Owens was more correct than he knew. He resigned from the network last April, you might recall, citing increased corporate meddling toward the long-running news magazine show. In a note to staff, he wrote that it became “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.” 

Less than three months later, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to pay $16 million to Donald Trump’s foundation* to settle a lawsuit the president filed against the network and “60 Minutes” alleging election interference over an interview with Kamala Harris. Didn’t matter that most legal experts thought the lawsuit frivolous and that CBS would have won. What mattered was that Paramount Global was working on a deal to be sold to mega-corporation Skydance Media and needed approval from Trump’s hand-picked FCC for the new conglomerate, which would be run by a gent named David Ellison, son of billionaire Oracle founder and Trump buddy Larry Ellison. 

[*Ed Note: the fund for his cosmetics, not any sort of philanthropic venture, for as we know, that prick wouldn't lift a finger for someone else]

Bari Weiss is German for Barry White

Sixteen mil is sofa cushion change in an $8 billion merger. Now comes word that CBS News will install Bari Weiss, 41, as editor-in-chief as an offshoot of Paramount’s nine-figure purchase of Weiss’s digital media outfit, The Free Press. Prior to TFP, Weiss did three-year stints as a columnist and opinion writer at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times. She left the Times in 2020 and on her way out the door dropped a public resignation letter in which she claimed she was subjected to a hostile work environment and harassed for her views by liberal colleagues. 

Weiss calls herself a centrist liberal who is “politically homeless” due to intolerance Left and Right, but many media knowers describe her as right-leaning and chummy with conservatives. Curiously, conservative Times voices David Brooks or Bret Stephens haven’t been similarly offended or constrained, yet we’re supposed to believe that a centrist was heckled out of the building because “intellectual curiosity is a liability at the Times,” she said. 

Weiss attracted millions of dollars from mostly anonymous donors for The Free Press startup, which began in 2021 as a newsletter but whose subscriber list and valuation grew quickly. Its purchase has been reported in the $150 million range, down from a reported $200 million ask this summer. It bills itself as “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” Yet she and it are heavy pro-Israel and routinely anti-“woke” and skeptical of social justice in society and academia. They regularly call out the worst excesses of the Left, while thinner on criticism of the Trump administration and conservative positions. 

Jay Michaelson, a respected author, rabbi, activist and blogger, wrote recently that there’s little evidence that she’s liberal or even centrist. He said that she tracks conservative and has long been guilty of stoking societal divide with questionable conclusions and sloppy logic and editing, all under the guise of free speech. 

Weiss’s appointment comes on the heels of Paramount recently naming a former Trump appointee and conservative think tank leader to be CBS ombudsman. The network’s long-running Sunday morning show Face the Nation also was instructed to change editing practices after Homeland Security Secretary and animated sack of hair Kristi Noem complained that she didn’t like the way her answers were edited and presented in a segment. 

Weiss’s Zionist leanings have left many to wonder how that will affect coverage of Israeli action and Palestinian suffering in Gaza. With Ellison openly talking of massive layoffs, many CBS News staffers are reportedly somewhere between concerned and freaked. 

If much of this comes across as a lot of newsroom inside baseball, that’s understandable. But as the site’s media grump, I’d argue that Weiss’s leadership may present not only a major shift in tone and practice at a marquee network, it also further chips away at the myth of a monolithic liberal media. Certainly, there are left-leaning sites and publications and plenty of liberal voices at various outlets. But corporate acquisition and consolidation have created huge umbrellas under which newspapers and news organizations work. Decisions are made now for bottom line reasons, irrespective of what they mean for newsrooms and journalistic standards and independence. News organizations are corporate commodities, not an essential component for a functioning democracy. 

Consider that last December, ABC’s parent company, Disney, also settled with Trump for $16 million after private citizen Trump sued ABC for defamation over George Stephanopolous’s imprecise language in discussing the E. Jean Carroll verdict. G-Steph said that Trump was “liable for rape” when the verdict was that he was liable for sexual abuse. The presiding judge said that the distinction between the two was semantic, but Disney settled and issued an apology anyway for several reasons, according to the New York Times: Disney feared that its brand would take a further hit after jousting with Florida governor Ron DeSantis and subsequent criticism and boycotts from conservative officials and customers; the Mouse Empire was also concerned that a Trump FCC would go after ABC’s news license; and it didn’t want to risk a trial that might go to the Trump-friendly Supreme Court. Disney’s a $200-billion brand, and again, $16 mil is pocket change. 

Seven months later, Paramount settled, rather than stand behind a First Amendment defense, signaling that government bullying is an effective tactic for squeezing free speech in general and journalism in particular when spread sheets rule the day. When Stephen Colbert called it for what it was, he was told that his late night show was going to be cancelled. Purely a financial decision, Paramount execs said, because the show loses money. Uh huh. Then, after Jimmy Kimmel’s fairly innocuous remark about MAGA attempting to score political points following conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing, FCC chair and Trump crony Brendan Carr talked about going after Kimmel and ABC’s broadcast license, and the network suspended him for a week. 

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Trump has done exactly what he promised, using the Presidency to go after those he considers enemies and those he thinks crossed him. He has banged the “fake news” drum for a decade over unflattering coverage, and with a weaponized justice system and a pliant regulatory structure, sometimes all it takes is the threat of government action or scrutiny to affect news decisions and slant reporting. No one knows what CBS News and “60 Minutes” will look like in six months or a year. Change is coming, with new corporate oversight and a hand-picked, conservative provocateur in charge of a thinned work force. The stopwatch is still tick-tick-ticking, but is it marking time or a more ominous countdown?