Bari Weiss Hasn’t ‘Murdered’ 60 Minutes After All
Scott Pelley accused Bari Weiss of “murdering” CBS’s 60 Minutes over the summer after he was fired for refusing to accept a culture of change at the long-running news program. But despite warnings from Pelley and others, the newsmagazine debuted its 59th season Sunday with much of the show’s core intact.
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In fact, despite critics’ fears that Weiss would destroy the show by dragging it to the right and making it more deferential to President Trump, the season premiere hardly shied away from criticizing him.
The show reported that the war in Iran is “costly and unpopular” and accused President Trump of pardoning “a string of unrepentant financial con men” and “rioters” at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The New York Times reported the show aired “with new correspondents and a refreshed stopwatch” but it was “more tweak than overhaul.”
The season premiere was heavily anticipated after Weiss took over the network and subsequently replaced much of the show’s senior leadership; many of those who were not outright fired exited the show on their own in dramatic fashion amid the upheaval.
Pelley and others resisted changes by Weiss and other new leaders who sought to return an air of objectivity to the program. Pelley was fired after he clashed with the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, questioning his qualifications and accusing Weiss of destroying the program.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Bilton wrote in Pelley’s letter of termination. “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.”
The return of the program this week made that clear. The show included several news-making interviews, including Norah O’Donnell’s conversation with an Air Force colonel who survived for nearly two days behind enemy lines after his F-15E was shot down over Iran, and a Lesley Stahl investigation into lobbyists who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to help convicts apply for presidential pardons.
The presidential pardon story alone was evidence of positive changes Weiss and her new hires have implemented. It was made possible by the new leaders’ decision to bring back the use of a hidden camera for the investigation and also relied on the brainpower of the investigative team at CBS News, a collaboration that had been “comparatively rare in the past but is now actively encouraged by Mr. Bilton and Ms. Weiss,” according to the New York Times.
While the program’s season premiere featured new faces, including former New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the version of America’s most-watched newsmagazine that returned to CBS largely defied predictions that Weiss would transform it into a fundamentally different program.
When Pelley was fired, he claimed the show “lost its DNA” when senior leaders and two correspondents were fired.
“Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos,” he claimed.
“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” he added. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”
Pelley’s claims only added fuel to concerns already brewing in the media, particularly among left-wing pundits who worried Weiss was brought in by the new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, to politicize the show. Critics cited Ellison’s ties to Trump, and Paramount’s multimillion-dollar settlement with the president in his lawsuit against the newsmagazine over its editing of a 2024 interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, as evidence of changes that likely lay ahead for the show.
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The Intercept previously called Weiss a “conservative ideologue” and claimed that her hiring means Ellison is “dropping any pretense of independence at the network,” while MSNBC falsely claimed that Weiss “runs a Trump-friendly site.”
But Weiss, a self-identified “left-leaning centrist,” made clear from the beginning that her goal was to serve the forgotten majority of Americans who are neither part of “an America-loathing far left” nor a “history-erasing far right” and have been ill-served.
Douthat, for his part, made clear in his debut on the show that its mission remains intact. He said on Sunday’s program that for six decades the show had “meant the same thing: journalism you can trust. Where we’re headed, we’re going to need it.”
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times focused heavily on islamophobia in its reporting on the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“Facing Islamophobia, Mamdani Keeps Focus on 9/11 Victims,” the outlet reported.
“As New York’s first Muslim mayor, Mr. Mamdani has been forced to navigate a delicate dynamic,” the story explains. “He must speak about Sept. 11 as the city’s top elected official, but also as a member of a religious group that has faced hostility and suspicion since the attacks, and is still being vilified by right-wing factions of the Republican Party.”
It goes on to cite a Change.org petition organized by relatives of 9/11 victims arguing that the mayor’s presence at the memorial would be a distraction.
But while the story acknowledges that the petition received more than 96,000 signatures, it fails to highlight why Mamdani’s critics wanted him to stay home.
“Mr. Mamdani has praised Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been linked to radical Islam, was named as an alleged co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and served as a character witness for the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ who was convicted in 1995 of plotting terror attacks against the United States,” the petition said. “Mr. Mamdani has endorsed candidates such as Aber Kawas, who described 9/11 as an attack ‘a couple of people did in the context of U.S. capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia,’ and who also expressed sympathy for Ahmed Ferhani, who pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue.”
Media Misses
• In a column for NR, Becket Adams debunks a recent Al Jazeera report accusing Israel “not only of destroying the shade in Gaza but of ‘decreasing the amount of oxygen’ in the region.” One Palestinian told the outlet there is “no shade at all” and it’s “the most horrific thing that can turn this heat into hell on earth.” But Adams notes the daily highs in Gaza this year were between 89 and 91 degrees Fahrenheit, which has been standard for the area going back to at least 2020, three years before the conflict started. And despite the description of the heat as hellish, Adams notes that the 89-to-91-degree range is a typical August high in Miami.
“More fantastical than characterizing 90-degree summer weather as ‘hell on earth’ is the claim that Israeli bombs have depleted the region’s oxygen,” he adds. “This is not World War II, and these are not RAF or USAAF firestorms, whose consumption of oxygen lasted hours, not days, weeks, and months. Also, referring to nonnuclear strikes as the ‘equivalent of eight atomic bombs’ is a choice.”
• Whoopi Goldberg urged voters to head to the polls this November, claiming “our lives literally depend on this.”
“This is now on all of us, every one of us, doesn’t matter your color, doesn’t matter your sex, you want it to change, you’re the only one who can do it. . . . Find out where you can vote and help your elders get to the places to vote,” she said.
