For some reason, this 60 Minutes story put me in mind of 1968.
That was the horrible year in American public life when 60 Minutes first went on the air. It was also the year that the Ford Mustang put a V-8 engine in the car, and Steve McQueen used that fantastic Mustang in the movie Bullitt.
What happened at CBS News is that they gave the keys to the Mustang to a know-it-all woman named Bari Weiss, and she drove that Mustang right into a brick wall.
I wasn’t against Nick Bilton coming in as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. I’ve admired Bilton’s work as an investigative reporter and loved one of his books, American Kingpin.
Any institution can use a shake-up once in a while. But it’s just bad management to fire the executive producer, the deputy executive producer, and, with Scott Pelley’s firing, three correspondents in one fell swoop. Add Anderson Cooper’s resignation and 60 Minutes is down four correspondents this year. It’s like some management expert said, “Get all the bloodshed done at once.”
That’s not how you treat a precious institution, especially one that’s making $200 million a year for your network and is up 9.1 percent in the ratings over last year.
It’s just bad management by people who don’t know what they don’t know.
Look, I’m a print journalist by training, and what I think is happening here is that a couple of print journalists, Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton, have a kind of a condescending view of television. I know, because when I was young, I shared it a little bit myself.
The attitude is that correspondents in television are not as intellectual as those in print journalism, and often don’t even write their own stories. Print people think TV is very performative, which, by the way, was the word that Nick Bilton used in the letter firing Scott Pelley to describe what he had been doing in a meeting.
All of these guys are performers. Mike Wallace was a performer. Morley Safer was a performer. Dan Rather was a performer.
That’s what took 60 Minutes to the very top of the ratings. It combined hard-hitting journalists with on-air performance, and there were all sorts of off-camera feuds to write about.
I covered media for Newsweek in the 1980s and ‘90s. I used to go over and sit with Don Hewitt, the street smart founder of 60 Minutes, a guy with the attention span of a gnat, the greatest news producer in the history of the medium, and watch as he reviewed pieces he was considering whether to air. Hewitt would always say, “It’s the audio, not the video.” That’s the key to a great piece.
It took very talented producers and very talented, yes, performers, who got into all kinds of public fights with each other, with the network, all the time. It gave me a lot to write about at Newsweek. It took all of those people to create a show with the quality of 60 Minutes.
It’s not easy to make a 13-minute 60 Minutes piece that millions of people want to watch. I get the sense that Weiss and maybe Bilton think it is. Why else would she go over to the 60 Minutes offices the day before a piece was supposed to air and pull the thread on a story producers had been working on for six months?
These jokers come in, and they think that, oh, we can just use 60 Minutes for brand extension. We can put 60 Minutes on TikTok. I don’t know exactly what their big new idea is, but they apparently want to take the formula and see if they can put their own twist on it.
Now, by this time, CBS had already done a lot of damage to 60 Minutes. Corporate cowards gave Donald Trump $16 million to settle an absolutely preposterous case that he brought against 60 Minutes for the way it edited Kamala Harris’s interview.
Stephen Colbert was absolutely right. That was a simple bribe by CBS, and by saying that on television, Colbert probably sealed his own fate.
So, the problems at 60 Minutes have been accumulating, and the question now is whether Weiss and Bilton have murdered 60 Minutes, as Scott Pelley alleged.
I hope not. I hope it’s not dead.
We need institutions like 60 Minutes to survive this sorry passage in our public life.
I wish them luck. I hope that talented journalists go to 60 Minutes now to help them come back. And I hope that the many talented producers who are still working at 60 Minutes can dry their tears and go to work on creating a terrific 59th season for one of the greatest shows in the history of television.
