Photo: Frankie Alduino for New York Magazine

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 Minutes is among the most popular shows in the country and clearly the top-rated newsmagazine in the country. So why do you think they want to make such radical change?

To me, the only explanation is that if you go back to that first skirmish, the battle over [Bill Whitaker’s] interview of Kamala Harris, you’ll see there was a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed over something that was really insignificant. And if it had been brought to the court and tried, I’m sure it would’ve been disposed of quickly. It was a specious argument and lawsuit, and 60 Minutes caved in and paid $16 million to the plaintiff to resolve this issue. And it was done, I’m sure, because of the fact that the FCC was in the process of approving the merger between Skydance and Paramount. That was the first indication that there were some problems ahead.

Add the Trump settlement to what happened with Stephen Colbert — even though CBS has said he was canceled for financial reasons — and people understandably may feel like there is corporate interference. When you were at 60 Minutes, did you ever feel interference from up top in terms of the stories you were doing?

Not in terms of the story that I was doing, but there was the case of tobacco, in which CBS corporate decided that it was not going to run a story about Jeffrey Wigand, who had been interviewed at 60 Minutes and talked about how all the tobacco companies had known for a long time that it was dangerous and that they were basically selling nicotine, which is addictive. And the corporation, which was run at the time by Larry Tisch, who happened to own a tobacco company, Lorillard, decided that it couldn’t be run and it didn’t run.

That incident was the basis for the film The Insider and is often seen as a clear example of overstepping by ownership. What was troubling in Scott Pelley’s statement on Tuesday night is he suggested that the new management had instructed him to insert bias or claims that were not factual into his reporting. What’s your thought when you hear something like that?

I think it’s important to point out that Scott was defending or actually rebelling against the firings of Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega and executive producer Tanya Simon and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich and protesting those firings, [which happened] for no stated reason, for no valid reason. I think everybody who worked on the show, and this is heavily reflected in Cecilia Vega’s farewell statement, [knew] things that had happened and that interfered with the independence of the show. Also there was the intimidation factor: People had become extremely nervous about what kinds of stories they could suggest, what kinds of stories they could work on, and how any story that would be critical of the Trump administration would face major obstacles to getting on the air.

That feels like a sea change from how the show has covered administrations both Republican and Democratic.

Yes. Look, in the times I’ve worked — 40 years at CBS and the 30 years at 60 Minutes — I’ve never seen interference like this, with the exception of the tobacco story, which eventually worked itself out. It’s just never happened before.

The great thing about 60 Minutes was you could do pretty much any story you wanted to as long as the editor of the show, the executive producer of the show, thought it was a good story. There were no limitations. There were certainly no limitations on going after an administration for a policy that was ill advised. And we did it all the time. And that was what made 60 Minutes great. We were unafraid to take on the government, and that’s what the First Amendment’s about.

It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without 60 Minutes, or a show like 60 Minutes, which is not afraid to take on the government. You see the timidity all across the broadcast schedule right now. The evening news shows are clearly being very careful about how they approach criticism of the government.

My understanding has always been that 60 Minutes, from the early-career producers on up to senior producers and to the correspondents, have a certain style and process for doing things. Do you feel like this new management has any understanding of that process and do you have any thoughts — since you do talk to people there — of what management may want differently in the next season?

I think that’s very unclear, and that’s part of the problem. What they don’t want is what they’ve got. And that happens to be the standard for television news. And that’s the one thing that has made 60 Minutes successful — the one thing that has really kept it on the air for so long is the journalism. It’s a word that you rarely hear used right now, and people have kind of forgotten what it means.

When Don Hewitt started it back in 1968, CBS was the top network, was considered to be the gold standard; “the Tiffany Network” they called it. And at the heart of that was journalism, the ability to go out and cover stories and put them on the air without fear and without regard for any kind of corporate pressure. And that is the thing that has sustained it over these years, and it’s never wavered. Now, it’s very hard to find that. It’s almost disappeared from the landscape in the first years of the second Trump administration.

It really has to do with the commitment of this administration to bring the press into line, to bring the media into line, to make the point that they are unhappy with the way journalism is being conducted on the networks. You see that most clearly in the statements of the FCC chair.

Last week, I spoke with Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner of the FCC, who’s been warning media companies like Disney to push back when the administration is investigating The View. It’s still an open question how much big corporations will push back, because Disney and ABC did settle the suit involving George Stephanopoulos with Trump just before he came into office but, more recently, has appeared willing to fight some of the latest actions by the government on First Amendment grounds. Do you believe companies are going to take a harder line?

I think it’s sort of a case-by-case thing, and, look, my understanding is there is what Andrew Ross Sorkin, who I have great admiration for, has pointed out: Corporate executives and corporations are not exempt from this assault, and they are being very, very careful and very, very cautious about opposing or saying anything critical of this administration because there are forms of retaliation available to the U.S. government if it doesn’t like the criticism. So I don’t think it’s just television. I think it’s the climate. I think there’s a climate of fear and intimidation that has been introduced by the administration that is affecting a bit of everything.

If you had the opportunity to give Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton any advice on steering the show forward, what would that be?

Well, I haven’t had the opportunity to speak to them, and I don’t think they’re interested in speaking to me. I think that from observing what’s gone on over the last year, they’re pretty well set in their ways and seem to be in agreement that 60 Minutes is a problem for them [to resolve] moving forward to accomplish the things they want to accomplish as corporate entities.

So there’s probably not much they would take in terms of advice. 

I think Scott Pelley came to that conclusion, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Scott just basically went in and cleared the air and threw in the towel — that he had sort of given up any hope of changing anyone’s mind at the corporate level.

When I spoke with Nick Bilton last week, he was excited and enthusiastic to take on this role, but clearly it’s going to be a challenge given that he doesn’t have TV-news experience, and I think this staff is really demoralized. So I wonder what this show is going to look like come September?

Well, I don’t think anybody knows. I mean, he says that he has a notebook full of ideas, but the problem is, and this is not an insignificant problem, putting on a television show is very complicated. Weiss and Bilton never had to deal with this, and they don’t have an understanding of how complicated it is. It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September, starting from the position that they’re in, having already discarded some of the most capable people at the show. I don’t think that there’s a plan in place; at least nobody’s been able to articulate it, and I think that they’re going to run into a lot of problems.

The thing about 60 Minutes, like the stopwatch, everything’s pretty carefully calculated. They’ve been on the air for 58 years, and during that period, they’d run into lots of different problems and solved them and figured out what needed to be done. The show itself is constructed to run like a stopwatch, and they’re talking about doing away with things that are going to create massive problems. For example, they’ve said that they don’t understand why there needs to be three pieces of the same length. The reason that there are three pieces of roughly the same length is that they can become interchangeable. Once you start changing that and you start deciding you want to run a piece that’s three minutes long and a piece that’s 15 minutes long, it becomes much more complicated to go to the shelf and pull something off that’s ready to go. That was one of the things that Don Hewitt figured out a long time ago.

I think the problem is that they don’t know what they don’t know in terms of putting on a television show every week.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This article was updated to reflect that Bill Whitaker interviewed Kamala Harris.