On the last Thursday of May, Tanya Simon’s staff packed up her office. They filled boxes with personal items accumulated over more than 25 years at 60 Minutes: Emmys, photos with celebrity interviewees such as Eminem, and portraits of the show’s legendary correspondents, including her father, Bob Simon. Tanya Simon had grown up at the show and for the past year had led it as executive producer. That morning, she was called into a meeting with her bosses, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, at 8:30 a.m., a strange time, given the standing CBS News 9 a.m. editorial meeting. She had been told to prepare for an autopsy of the season that had just concluded — to go over what went right, what went wrong — and to keep an open mind. Instead, she was fired. As she left 555 West 57th Street that evening, teary-eyed, her colleagues lined the hallways and applauded. “The last thing she said before the door closed behind her was ‘I fought so hard,’” one former staffer recalls.

Simon’s deputy, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, was also fired that day, along with two producers, Guy Campanile and Matthew Polevoy, and two on-air correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. (Campanile’s dismissal took place over Zoom as he was scheduled to leave for the airport to report a story with correspondent Lesley Stahl in Spain. Charles Forelle, one of Weiss’s deputies, told Campanile that, even though he was no longer a part of 60 Minutes, he could still shoot the segment if he wanted to. Campanile, shocked, declined Forelle’s offer.) The culling would quickly come to be known within the company as Black Thursday.

The future came in the form of Nick Bilton, Simon’s replacement, a technology journalist with no broadcast-television experience. Bilton arrived with all the subtlety of a dinosaur-killing asteroid. “I am here because the world outside this building has changed a lot since this show was conceived — and we have to talk honestly about what that means,” Bilton wrote in a memo to staff. “I’m here to lead this show, not preserve it under glass.” Bilton’s past crimes against journalism — credibly quoting a vaccine skeptic, claiming to break the Theranos scandal — were dredged up and recirculated, while media newsletters obsessed with Weiss’s moves went to work publishing staff complaints that she was wrecking the show as a favor to the Trump administration.

The scandal exploded on Monday at Bilton’s first all-staff meeting. He and Weiss had been trying to reach Scott Pelley all weekend, desperate to placate one of their last remaining stars, but Pelley had been ignoring their calls. He showed up at the meeting dressed in a suit and tie and alligator shoes, ready to put on a performance. He tore into the new boss over his “slender qualifications” for the job, claimed Weiss was “murdering 60 Minutes,” and paced around as he sipped from a coffee mug. Pelley was fired the next day. With the departure of Anderson Cooper in May, that left the show with just three correspondents: Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, who, after staying quiet for a few days, announced their decision to remain in a joint memo. “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die,” they wrote.

Black Thursday and its aftermath were the culmination of months of conflict between Weiss and the staff of the most successful news show in the history of American television. At first, some at 60 Minutes were optimistic about her appointment: The business of broadcast news was in need of innovation, and Weiss had been brought to CBS News by Paramount owner David Ellison in 2025 as a change agent, occupying the newly created position of editor-in-chief. Some at 60 Minutes were even fans of The Free Press, the heterodox “anti-woke” outlet Weiss founded in 2021. “People don’t talk about their politics here,” says one staffer. “It’s not this lefty, progressive place.” Almost instantly, however, the show was experiencing something like organ rejection. For the staff, Weiss at best was making poor, rash decisions because of a lack of television experience; at worst she was there to help Ellison get regulatory approval for Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. “What happened was not editorial disagreement; it was a hostile takeover,” says a former 60 Minutes staffer. “The people making decisions at CBS News do not know what they’re doing. This is amateur hour.”

And yet, since the firings, producers and correspondents from CBS News have been lobbying heavily for a spot. “There’s this public condemnation of what’s going on, but privately and quietly, a lot of us are saying, ‘It’s about fucking time,’” says one CBS News staffer. “Not for the leadership in the place to go down — Tanya was beloved — but she did represent a 60 that wasn’t open to other people. Privately, a lot of correspondents feel like, Huh, maybe my chance is coming now.”

While nearly everyone agrees Weiss & Co. could have probably handled things better, there’s a sense that changes at 60 Minutes were always going to be excruciatingly difficult. The very notion of an editor-in-chief was seen as an imposition. As the crown jewel at the Tiffany Network, the newsmagazine program had so much clout that it was literally located across the street from its parent company at 524 West 57th Street, which over time resulted in an idiosyncratic, insular culture that would have been tough for any incoming executive to crack. “Tweaking or changing or improving 60 Minutes is like defusing a bomb: You’ve got to move cautiously, and you must avoid cutting the wrong wire, because the thing will blow up in your face,” says a longtime network executive.

Now that the bomb has gone off so spectacularly, Weiss and Bilton have spent the summer rebuilding the show and preparing for the debut of its 59th season in September, all while much of the staff took its traditional July recess. Late last month, Bilton announced a slate of new correspondents and contributors, including CBS’s longtime anchor Norah O’Donnell and the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat — a personal coup for Weiss, who rose to notoriety at the Times’ “Opinion” section. It’s also a coup for the new 60 Minutes: On his Interesting Times podcast, Douthat showed that he could land sought-after interviews with the likes of Vice-President J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and was the rare Times columnist who commanded respect across the political spectrum. (The Times was so invested in the show that, just before he quit, the furniture arrived for the in-home podcast setup that the Times had built for him in New Haven.) And in August, Bilton announced that New Yorker writer Ariel Levy would come on as a contributor, another hire that seems to be taking 60 Minutes in a brainier, more highbrow direction.

What comes next will either vindicate the staff’s suspicions of Weiss or lay bare an uncomfortable fact: that 60 Minutes, as it existed under Simon, wasn’t much worth fighting for.

In 1968, CBS News veteran Don Hewitt created 60 Minutes in an effort to bring a version of Life magazine to television, utilizing a mix of serious investigative pieces and lighter celebrity interviews. Hewitt essentially wanted to create mini-documentaries. “I began to think we could make a three-subject hour and........

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