Hey, happy Friday. My phone almost melted down from all the incoming messages about the changes at CBS News yesterday. Everyone in the TV news business is talking about it. Some are horrified, some are intrigued and many others are just plain confused. Here's what my reporting has found... |
The '60 Minutes' disruption |
CBS News is taking a huge risk by overhauling "60 Minutes." Why blow up a profitable, prestigious newsmagazine when there is so much else at CBS that needs fixing?
Bari Weiss and her surprising pick for "60 Minutes" executive producer, Nick Bilton, have multiple answers to that question. You may find the answers persuasive, or not. I certainly find the answers to be... provocative.
The short version, expressed by seven sources on condition of anonymity, and also relayed more diplomatically in Weiss and Bilton's memos yesterday, is that CBS management believes "60 Minutes" is an archaic institution that's in urgent need of reinvention. What "60 Minutes" defenders see as its strengths, they see as potential shortcomings.
In her first six months as CBS News editor-in-chief, Weiss perceived "60 Minutes" as calcified and resistant to change. When the old guard touted the newsmag's stellar ratings, she said that success was all the more reason to change now, from a position of strength.
In meetings with "60" staffers and other CBS Newsers yesterday, Weiss and Bilton invoked the tech industry truism that "If you don't disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted."
CBS veterans are definitely feeling disrupted this morning. "We know this may not land with certain audiences," a CBS News exec told me, admitting that some staffers (and maybe some "60" viewers) will be unsettled by the changes.
But "at the end of the day, the journalism will speak for itself," Bilton told me by phone this morning, shortly after Weiss introduced him on the network's 9 a.m. call.
So let's get into all the angles here...
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Bilton's appointment was announced yesterday via Ben Mullin and Michael Grynbaum's NYT story, minutes after news leaked that the exec producer for the past year, Tanya Simon, had been let go. "Leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter," Simon wrote in her exit memo.
Two "60" correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, were also terminated. Add Anderson Cooper's recent departure, and that's three of the show's seven full-time correspondents gone — meaning Weiss, Tom Cibrowski and Bilton will immediately be in rebuilding mode.
Frankly, that's where they want to be. When she arrived at CBS, Weiss was surprised by the place's ancient qualities. (CBS News HQ did not have a dedicated podcast studio.) Weiss was put off by some of the organization's ingrained habits and legacy attitudes, just as her lack of newsroom expertise and TV experience put off some CBS veterans.
Weiss resolved to really, truly overhaul it — asserting that the old ways hadn't worked, since newscasts like the "CBS Evening News" have been stuck in third place in the ratings and outfits like CBS have not built big new digital businesses to replace what's slowly but surely evaporating.
Weiss and her allies also sensed that a proverbial "deep state" at CBS would reject her ideas and try to wait her out, knowing that the news division has cycled through news bosses many times.
So it makes perfect sense, from her POV, to bring in outsiders, even or especially those without traditional TV news experience.
"When people say about Nick, 'he hasn't worked in network news for 20 years' — yes, exactly, that's the whole point!" a CBS source exclaimed last night.
Of course, the new era at CBS News has been picked apart, especially given parent company Paramount's attempts to cozy up to President Trump and its pending acquisition of CNN and the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Early missteps and malfunctions have heightened industry speculation that Weiss, too, won't last. But the Bilton appointment may be the ultimate expression of both her outsider vision and Paramount CEO David Ellison's support for it. Ellison, I'm told, had a long meeting with Bilton during the hiring process.
"David understands that broadcast is an iceberg that's melting," another CBS source remarked.
Yes, but some rank-and-file staffers fear that management's changes are like hot air, speeding up the melting process...
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An audacious outside hire |
Full disclosure here: I have known Bilton for nearly 20 years. We worked together at The New York Times (where we both trained under David Carr), and we taped a couple of podcast episodes together at Vanity Fair.
So I can easily see why Bilton and Weiss hit it off. Bilton is an ideas guy, "a million ideas a minute," as one confidant said. With his tech reporting background, he is fluent in the AI revolution and fearless about predicting the future. (He once wrote a book titled "I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works.") And with his credentials as an author and filmmaker, he can confidently sketch out a vision for the future of media.
His memo to CBS did that yesterday. If you haven't read it yet, I tweeted out the full text here.
At this morning's 9 a.m. meeting, Weiss called Bilton "unbelievably ambitious, entrepreneurial, collaborative" and an "idea generation machine."
Many staffers are skeptical that he'll have the right ideas. But a Weiss ally told me that Bilton, along with others, is part of a larger "transformation."
"We need people with great story sense, great vision, and who are not forged into one very narrow way of storytelling," they said. Ultimately, "linear is just another format," and what CBS really needs are "the internal capabilities to make modern digital video." That same wrenching transition is happening everywhere...
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As CNBC's Alex Sherman wrote, "One of Bilton's biggest initial challenges will be winning over CBS News employees who believe many of the changes being implemented in the newsroom are politically motivated."
Hours after being fired with nearly a year left on her contract, Vega said that the editorial independence of "60 Minutes" is being threatened from the inside.
"In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories," she said in a statement. "Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."
A CBS News spokesperson responded, "We respect Ms. Vega and her contributions, but her claims are not based in reality."
Former correspondent Steve Kroft and former exec producer Bill Owens also spoke out yesterday, with Owens telling Status, "They're killing 60 Minutes."
At the same time, many staffers at CBS (and The Free Press) welcomed Bilton, with some posting cheerful messages on social media, sensing that real digital expansion of the "60 Minutes" brand is now possible.
But the Trumpy tension is real. Trump watches "60 Minutes." He covets "60 Minutes." He posts screeds about "60 Minutes." He sued over "60 Minutes."
This morning, I asked Bilton directly, "Will you shy away from aggressive coverage of the Trump administration?"
"Absolutely not," he said. "If you look at Season 58 of '60 Minutes,' the team produced incredible coverage of the Trump administration, and that will continue in Season 59, Season 60 and so on."
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'The show itself is not going to change' |
Some of Bilton's comments to Semafor and New York mag worried – and even offended – both CBS staffers and other industry insiders yesterday. He told (his former editor) Michael Calderone, of his lack of TV experience, "Do I need to know which button to press to make sure the show goes on air on a Sunday night? No." That quote displayed "blind arrogance," CJR's Susie Banikarim tweeted.
Bilton went on to say, "If there are questions I don't have the answers to, there is a building full of people who can answer them." And that was obviously his broader point. But TV news is a lot harder than it looks. While Bilton does have experience making projects for Netflix and HBO, the learning curve will be steep.
Bilton's stronger quote was to the NYT: "When you take an insider and you put them inside a company, nothing changes. I'm not saying that we're going to change the show completely and drastically. I'm saying that there are all these approaches and ideas that we can do... And I think you need that outside vision to be able to do that."
My hot take on this isn't all that hot: Embracing outsider thinking without alienating the insiders who get shows on the air is a tightrope walk.
Guessing that yesterday was head-spinning for all involved, I asked Bilton this morning about his overarching "60 Minutes" message. His answer: "The show itself is not going to change. It is going to remain three incredible short-form documentaries, essentially, which is what it was founded on with Don Hewitt. The core of '60' will remain '60.'"
But beyond the Sunday night broadcast, "we'll be reaching audiences in places that they need to be reached," he said.
I remember past efforts by "60" to expand online. (The show once had a deal with Quibi!) But the newsmag's current social and digital strategy feels stale and way too horizontal to Weiss and her inner circle. So as "60" looks to add new digitally native correspondents and land big scoops, it will also launch new iterations of the franchise in new places.
A year from now, "60" might be showing up on CNN, too.
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After Byron Allen's "Comics Unleashed" debuted to a much smaller audience than "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," CBS touted the switch as a profit-generating business move.
In an unusual statement last night, the network said, "We're proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue. With this 'time buy' model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing." (LateNighter says "the math is more complicated" than that.)
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ABC calls out FCC's 'unconstitutional' order |
ABC is laying the groundwork for a landmark First Amendment fight.
Yesterday, ABC filed the license-renewal paperwork that the FCC demanded last month. (You'll recall that the order came right after Trump demanded ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel.) ABC attached an extraordinary objection letter that said the FCC's license challenge was "unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional." Read our story about that here.
"The only plausible reason to issue the order is to punish the station for speech the government does not like," ABC wrote in the letter, which was unsigned but sounded a lot like Paul Clement, the Supreme Court litigator ABC retained earlier this month.
FCC chair Brendan Carr responded by repeating his claim that the license challenge is part of the agency's Disney DEI probe.
"If Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination, if it failed to operate broadcast stations in the public interest, it will be held accountable," he tweeted.
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Gearing up for a free speech fight |
Legal experts have told me that ABC's responses to the FCC seem to be written in anticipation of a future court battle.
Yesterday's letter said the FCC's intent was "to suppress speech — to ramp up toward possible license revocation and cause the station and others to think twice before they say something the government might dislike." ABC concluded, "When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence."
Disney isn't alone here. A group of Senate Democrats recently sent Carr a letter requesting he take back his order, calling it "an egregious abuse of power and a clear violation of the First Amendment." Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chair, told The Guardian in April that the agency's denial of ABC's license "would have a hard time at the courts," meaning, as the FCC's lone Democrat Anna Gomez has said, the process is the punishment.
“Disney and its ABC stations are the latest victims of this administration’s campaign of censorship and control,” Gomez wrote on X yesterday. “I am glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
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Hours before ABC filed the license paperwork, the FCC published a public notice about the "public interest" obligations that broadcasters must meet. It was another flexing of power by Carr, who said "the agency will take appropriate actions to ensure compliance," even though the "public interest" standard has been ill-defined for decades.
>> In response to that notice, Gomez asserted that broadcasters should "ignore these latest threats and stiffen their spine."
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Perplexity responds to CNN lawsuit |
Perplexity had only four words in its response to CNN's lawsuit that we covered in yesterday's edition: "You can’t copyright facts."
The statement, from the AI company's chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer, summed up the tug-of-war between news organizations and AI firms.
On X, journalist Nick Wallis added a few more words to Perplexity's four: "…but you should be able to protect the time and expertise spent gathering and publishing them."
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"An old-fashioned newspaper war is brewing in the nation’s capital," the NYT's Katie Robertson writes: "The Washington Star, a newspaper that stopped printing more than 40 years ago, has started publishing again under the ownership of Dovid Efune, a media executive and publisher of The New York Sun."
Of course, this comes "just weeks after the politics site NOTUS announced it would rebrand as The Star and expand its mission to cover local news and sports in Washington."
>> As WaPo's Scott Nover noted, the Washington Star Company has also sued NOTUS "for infringing on its trademark."
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