Steve Kroft Says the 60 Minutes We’ve Known ‘No Longer Exists’ |
The meltdown at 60 Minutes has transfixed the media world this week, as CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss fired deeply respected staffers and correspondents, installed broadcast-news outsider Nick Bilton as the show’s executive producer, and sparked a messy standoff with Scott Pelley, who grilled his new boss and accused Weiss of “murdering” the show — all before being shown the door himself. A pointed termination letter, along with a stream of good-bye emails, statements, and rebuttals, have laced the saga with claims of insubordination, incompetence, and bias toward the Trump administration.
To Steve Kroft, who spent three decades at 60 Minutes before retiring in 2019, the show, “as the audience has known it, no longer exists.”
“They’ve made it clear — they being the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison — that they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want,” he tells me. Kroft is not sure, precisely, what 60 Minutes will look like when it resumes: “It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September.”
Kroft points to Donald Trump’s October 2024 lawsuit against CBS News over the editing of a Kamala Harris segment and corporate parent Paramount’s decision to settle with the president the following year — as the company sought FCC approval to complete a merger with Ellison’s Skydance — as the “first sort of skirmish” on the road to the current turmoil. Amid settlement talks, in April 2025, then–executive producer Bill Owens resigned over concerns about editorial independence.
But sweeping changes at CBS really got underway after Paramount bought the Free Press in October for $150 million and Ellison, now CEO, appointed Weiss, who lacked any television-news background, to steer the newsroom. Over a tumultuous eight months, Weiss has reshaped CBS News while igniting a series of controversies, including abruptly pulling a 60 Minutes segment on Trump’s immigration crackdown that drew accusations of political meddling.
Kroft frames the overhaul of 60 Minutes within a broader pattern of “timidity” by TV news and an increase of cautiousness by the corporate world. “I think there’s a climate of fear that has been introduced,” he says, “and intimidation by the administration that is affecting a bit of everything.”
In the last few days we’ve seen 60 Minutes upended by the new management, resulting in the firing of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and Scott Pelley. What are your thoughts right now on the state of the show?
I think basically 60 Minutes, as the audience has known it, no longer exists. The firings are too substantial. All of the people involved are very good journalists, and the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison, have made it clear they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want. They thought that what 60 Minutes was doing had become outdated and old and musty and needed to be changed, in spite of the fact that the audience has gone up 9 percent in the last year.
That’s what’s most surprising to people. It’s one thing for Bari Weiss & Co. to want to shake up the CBS Evening News, which is in third place, but 60........