‘They’ve Lost Control’: What Bari Weiss Got Wrong at 60 Minutes

When Scott Pelley went scorched earth at his freshly installed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton this week, he put on display what top newsroom veterans told me is basically the darkest timeline. The confrontation is exactly what executive producers and newsroom leaders strive to avoid: a full-on verbal wrestling match between a top lieutenant of a new editor’s regime and a longtime correspondent and face of a network’s franchise program who has gravitas and a nothing-to-prove mind-set. But that’s exactly what Bari Weiss has had to deal with all week at her CBS News — and the top editors and executives across the media world are gawking, gossiping, and shaking their heads at what they see as elemental incompetence. Politics aside, newsroom leaders agree that whatever Weiss’s ultimate goal is, she has botched it at nearly every level.

“She basically cut her dude’s balls off,” one veteran magazine editor told me of Weiss setting up Bilton to be the face of her blunt changes to 60 Minutes. “If you have a staff who views you as a person with shit journalistic values, and you have a major hire, you want to hire someone who looks rock-solid in terms of integrity and independence.”

During conversations with multiple media leaders and newsroom managers this week, they all agreed on one thing: It should never have gone this far. Weiss’s original sin was setting up Bilton to be in a boxing ring with Pelley without any backup. The result is not only a mess Weiss and Bilton have created on their own — it’s a failure even rookie managers usually know to avoid. 

From a high vantage point it almost looks like Weiss and Bilton are trying to ruin CBS, one top editor who’s run multiple elite newsrooms says. “I think they’re really running an experiment of how low their ratings can go. Like, ‘How do we destroy our own broadcast business?’ They’ve lost control of their own big brands.”

The top brass I spoke with collectively had the same reaction: Bilton and Weiss could have easily avoided this. And they all painted an apocalyptic picture of what Weiss has ultimately done to the network in the span of just a single week. “It really could be about destroying an institution just for fun,” a veteran news editor says. 

Perhaps someone like Pelley would have decided to go out in a blaze of glory no matter what. But the combat that broke out between Pelley and Bilton could have been avoided by what good editors and managers usually do: coming in with an olive branch. “To an extent, there’s always a performative element, in that people are going to ask questions sometimes to make a point or be provocative,” another seasoned editor-in-chief of multiple news organizations says, adding, “A prudent journalism manager listens carefully and listens deeply and doesn’t respond defensively even when provoked.” 

The situation would be a delicate balancing act for anyone. At its core, the mission for Weiss is to shake up CBS to try to reverse its mostly downward viewership trend (60 Minutes is an exception to the trajectory of most broadcast news) and juice the network’s energy. But savvy incoming editors know to come in promising stability and peace — even if that lasts only a few weeks or months.

“One thing Bilton could have done the minute he was hired is call all the people who could cause him trouble and say something like, ‘I know it’s been a rocky time here, but I’m a real newsman, and I want to make something great together,’” the longtime magazine editor told me. “Even if he’s not sure he wants to keep them in the long term, just reaching out goes a long way. The last thing you want is to be the face of a crackdown your first day on the job.” 

It’s smart to just not make any real changes for the first few months, that editor added: “No upside to coming in hot.” 

That’s not what happened, of course. Coverage of the all-staff meeting portrayed Pelley as on the verge of unhinged. Puck News reported that Pelley took Bilton “to task.” Megyn Kelly called him “arrogant” and “a prick.” The headline of a Brian Stelter joint at CNN read, “Scott Pelley erupts at CBS leaders over ‘60 Minutes’ overhaul.”

Weiss and Bilton were ill-prepared for this. “The job of the people running CBS is to have this not happen,” the top editor of elite newsrooms told me. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is or who started or ‘Scott’s being a diva.’ The job is to make sure your talent not go out and destroy your brand — and they really can because they are the brand. And there’s no real excuse for it.”

The fact that Pelley was the face of the opposition made it particularly difficult. He’s one of a few people with the clout to be adversarial and actually get attention for it. Viewers have “decades of feelings for Scott Pelley,” the top editor says. So when Pelley speaks out, “that’s a big business problem.” 

While the disaster began on Monday, that first all-staff meeting could have been the end of the crisis for Weiss and Bilton. Weiss’s best option was pretty clear: figure out how to deescalate. Instead, she chose to essentially pour more gasoline on this dumpster fire. First, she and Bilton blamed Pelley for the entire skirmish. Then, on the next day’s morning conference call, Weiss said the standard “trust and mutual respect” of a newsroom was broken by Pelley. Pelley then accused Weiss and Bilton of lying. Pelley was quickly fired.

But the fallout has been worse for CBS than for Pelley. “They’re in a situation where they have done huge damage to their own business,” the top editor added. 

By Thursday afternoon, Bilton had released a new statement working to comfort the staff. But that should have been the approach from the beginning, the newsroom managers agreed. “If Bilton had started with this tone, he might have avoided disaster,” a former leader of multiple marquee newsrooms told me. “But if he had started with this tone, he would’ve never gotten the job.”

So now that the damage is done, what’s going to happen? Probably nothing good. The veteran news editor expects the next domino to fall to be someone on staff actually going on air to call out Weiss. It’s worth nothing that Pelley’s longtime colleagues Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim have decided to stay, though not without reservations.

“I guess I’m waiting for ‘Who’s going to be the person to turn to the camera and call this shit out on air?’ I think it will happen,” the veteran news editor says. “You see hints of it in some cases. Parting messages. There have been slight things, but does somebody actually jump off the cliff and make a very public pronouncement right there? It’s, like, straight out of The Morning Show.”