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For many years now, CBS News employees entering the network’s New York headquarters have walked by a poster showing the seven correspondents who have helped keep 60 Minutes the most-watched show in news for 52 straight television seasons: Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Jon Wertheim and Cecilia Vega.
Over the last tumultuous week, three of those correspondents – Pelley, Alfonsi and Vega – have been fired. Cooper – who is also a CNN primetime anchor – announced in February that he was leaving the show. Amid the most significant uproar in the show’s lengthy history, CBS News staffers and 60 Minutes veterans now have two central questions: who will be left to make the show’s 59th season, which begins in September? And will it still feel like 60 Minutes?
In addition to the departure of four of the show’s seven full-time correspondents, CBS News fired the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor, and other key staffers. Nick Bilton, a veteran journalist without broadcast management experience, was hired to replace Simon as executive producer.
“What are they going to put on the air in three months?” asked one CBS News staffer who was not authorized to comment.
“It is not going to look like 60 Minutes in the fall,” a show insider predicted.
Some have speculated that Stahl, 84, and Whitaker, 74, could also choose to leave the show after their colleagues were ousted – though they have not yet commented on their status. As they had with Pelley, who did not engage, Weiss and Bilton have made outreach efforts to the three remaining full-time correspondents since Thursday, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
“It’s a deep, deep wound,” a second CBS News staffer said, explaining the “tight” connections between the show’s staffers, many of whom have worked together for decades.
On Monday morning, Pelley stunned CBS News leaders by lambasting Bari Weiss’s leadership of the network in a staff meeting with Bilton and one of the editor-in-chief’s deputies, Charles Forelle. Pelley accused Weiss of intentionally “murdering” the show, and said both she and Bilton were unqualified for the roles they hold. Pelley’s behavior in the meeting was deemed by CBS News to serve as “cause” for his firing.
But in a sign that the show’s staff were behind him, Pelley was heartily applauded as the meeting wrapped up, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Officially, CBS News has not yet explained what the show’s cast will look like, though Weiss said during a staff-wide meeting on Wednesday that there would be additions.
Explaining the network’s decision to terminate Pelley on Tuesday evening, a day after he clashed with CBS News brass, Weiss talked about “the kind of stories that Nick Bilton is going to put on the air come September in Season 59 with the amazing team that’s still there, and hopefully from some new people that are going to join us”.
An obvious promotion would be upgrading Norah O’Donnell, a contributing correspondent, to full-time status, a notion first raised by the media newsletter Status earlier this year. O’Donnell conducted a well-received interview with Donald Trump for a late April episode of 60 Minutes.
But 60 Minutes correspondents are not easily replaced. Viewers have tuned in to watch them for decades. They trust them in a way that defies the dynamics of modern media, at a time when news consumers are saturated with content produced by hordes of people they may not even know. The most recent season of 60 Minutes, which ended on 17 May, averaged 9.1 million total viewers an episode, impressive numbers, especially in an era when networks worry about losing audience.
The departures come amid concerns that CBS has caved in to Trump.
And there are likely more difficult headlines to come. Even if Stahl and Whitaker decide to stick around, there is a chance that one of the ousted correspondents or producers could take legal action against the network, something that would surely keep 60 Minutes’ headaches in the news all summer, when the show’s staff should be focused on readying pieces for the fall.
In his memo to staff upon joining as executive producer, Bilton talked about the need to move the show into the future. “The world we are reporting on, and the world we are reporting to, where people consume their news, has moved,” he wrote. “And if we don’t move with it, in the ways that matter, we won’t be here for the next 60 years. I want to do everything humanly possible to ensure that we are.” Bilton said he would go on a listening tour and come back to the staff in about 30 days “with where we go from here”.
While the show will certainly return this fall for a 59th season, the broader question is whether the audience will give Weiss and Bilton’s 60 Minutes a shot – or decide to try something else at 7pm every Sunday night.
