Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” received a hostile welcome Monday from the CBS News program’s most respected correspondent, Scott Pelley, as the staff is still reeling over last week’s firings.
In the first staff meeting since Bilton was named last week, Pelley accused CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the country’s most-watched news program, which recently finished the TV season with a 9% ratings increase. Recordings of the meeting were circulated to journalists.
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.” Pelley also attacked the credentials of Bilton, a former New York Times tech reporter and documentary filmmaker, who, like Weiss, has no previous experience running a TV news operation.
Bilton was named to replace Tanya Simon on Thursday, an unexpected move that also came with the firings of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The moves were made by Weiss, who has targeted the prestigious program for changes since she arrived at the network in the fall.
David Ellison, chief executive of CBS News parent Paramount, brought in Weiss — a skeptic of legacy media — with a mandate to move the division more to the political center. But many critics have seen the move as an attempt to placate the Trump administration while Ellison seeks regulatory approval for his deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery,
“60 Minutes” has long been in Trump’s crosshairs. The president sued the program last year over the editing of an interview with his 2024 opponent former Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit was settled just ahead of the Federal Communications Commission clearing the way for the takeover of Paramount by Ellison’s Skydance Media.
One person close to “60 Minutes” said attendees at the meeting in the Manhattan West Side offices described it as something they had never witnessed in their careers. The confrontation — and the applause Pelley received from his colleagues during the meeting — also demonstrates how CBS News management may have underestimated the staff’s devotion to the program, now nearing its sixth decade, that has long been considered the most powerful and respected platform in TV journalism.
A representative for CBS News declined to comment on the meeting.
Pelley holds especially high stature at the network because of his work over the years in dangerous war zones. When he was an anchor at “CBS Evening News,” he displayed photos of CBS News journalists who have died in the line of duty for the network going back to George Polk, who was killed during Greece’s civil war in 1948.
People close to CBS News management said both Bilton and Weiss reached out to Pelley last week to discuss the changes and their plans for the program’s future but he did not respond.
One CBS News veteran said the tense meeting “reads like Scott wants to be fired.”
Weiss has maintained she is committed to expanding the “60 Minutes” brand so it generates viewing and revenue outside its Sunday night broadcast. But she has also clashed with producers and correspondents over the handling of stories such as Alfonsi’s report on the Trump administration’s use of harsh El Salvador prisons to hold undocumented Venezuelan migrants.
Alfonsi’s message to colleagues saying the segment was held for political reasons led to her dismissal from the program.
Vega posted a message last week claiming she had been facing pressure to insert political bias into her stories. “I very much fear what comes next for … the future of the legendary broadcast,” Vega said in a social media post on Thursday, referring to “60 Minutes.”
A CBS News representative said last week that Vega’s claims “are not based in reality.”
Bilton has tried to reassure veterans at the program that he remains committed to the program’s mandate to provide tough, investigative journalism. The words he’s used in several meetings are that next season will not be much different than the successful year the program just completed.
“He’s very much committed to continuing and extending the kind of journalism that ’60 Minutes’ has been known for,” said one person close to Bilton.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com ’
