60 Minutes viewership rebounded after Bari Weiss began her tenure at CBS, despite Scott Pelley’s claim that the Free Press co-founder is “killing” the program, television viewership data show.
CBS News fired Pelley on Tuesday after the former 60 Minutes correspondent questioned the qualifications of newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton and the intentions of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intention with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Bilton wrote in a termination letter to Pelley.
Pelley’s firing is the latest bombshell in Weiss’s contentious CBS overhaul. The Thursday before Pelley’s outburst, Weiss fired correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, as well as executive producer Tanya Simon.
“[Bari Weiss] is murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley interrupted Bilton, according to the New York Times. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
But what, exactly, is Weiss murdering at CBS?
In his statement responding to Bilton’s publicized letter, Pelley pointed to the program’s recent ratings gains.
“This spring, at the end of our 58th season, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS,” he said.
But Weiss assumed her post a week after the latest season began on Sept. 28, a fact Pelley may have overlooked. A Washington Examiner analysis of data compiled by the United States Television Database shows that 60 Minutes suffered an 8.32% decline in average television viewership in the three years leading up to Weiss’s October 2025 editorial takeover.
Pelley insists that 60 Minutes has always “stood for fairness against the forces of political bias.” Never mind the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s 2020 election study, which found that CBS’s coverage of Joe Biden was 89% positive, while its coverage of Donald Trump was 95% negative. In the Shorenstein Center’s words, “Biden’s coverage on CBS was the most positive ever recorded for a television-age presidential nominee.” Trump’s, by contrast, was the most negative.
Pelley should spare viewers his disproven claims of objectivity and fairness. Why should anyone take his accusations of editorial interference seriously?
Jim Acosta, the former CNN correspondent and anchor, has made a similar complaint, warning that CBS is becoming a “propaganda giant.”
“I think this is an ideological project of the Ellisons, who have bought CBS, Paramount, and Bari Weiss. And they’re going to try to translate this ideological experiment over to CNN,” Acosta said on Katie Couric’s podcast. “You’re going to have what is essentially the makings of a propaganda giant.”
“You are taking two news organizations, CBS and CNN, that had been operating as, you know, regular tried-and-true news divisions and in effect trying to turn them into propaganda arms of the Trump administration,” he continued.
But the coverage imbalance at CBS and CNN exposed these supposedly objective news divisions as propaganda arms long before Weiss arrived at CBS or Mark Thompson restructured CNN. Many Americans reached Acosta’s conclusion about media propaganda years ago. The only question is why Pelley and Acosta care now.
Their outrage over alleged Trump-era interference is a moral front for material loss.
Pelley, Acosta, and other credential-class journalists ignored Americans’ frustrations for years. Many smuggled bias into their reporting while hiding behind press passes. Journalists clustered in Manhattan and Washington while sneering at their landlocked neighbors as “deplorables.” Americans watched members of the press attend galas, soirees, and insider dinners in the same elite rooms they claimed to scrutinize. The credential class produced articles, television monologues, and opinion pieces for one another in a cycle of perpetual self-flattery.
Americans noticed. They are turning instead to digital newsletters, podcasters, and trusted independent voices.
SANCTIMONIOUS SCOTT PELLEY FINDS OUT NO ONE IS INDISPENSABLE
Now publishers, executives, and editors are firing, restructuring, and reinventing legacy newsrooms in an effort to regain public trust. To Pelley, that scramble sounds like “editorial interference.” In reality, it is what happens when the institutional credit line of the old media class finally gets declined.
So, what did Bari Weiss murder at CBS?
The press’s anachronistic pomposity.