CBS chaos will lead to 60 Minutes suffering 'a slow, embarrassing death': media expert

Down from seven correspondents to four on “60 Minutes” after CBS News head Bari Weiss took a wrecking ball to the popular Sunday night newsmagazine, there are fears about the coming season’s launch as well as its long-term viability.

According to the Washington Post, newly fired correspondent Scott Pelley “ignited a firestorm in a Monday meeting, questioning the credentials of the show’s new boss, Nick Bilton, accusing CBS News head Bari Weiss of 'murdering' the show, and demanding answers about why his colleagues, including fellow correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, were fired the previous Thursday.”

The confrontation prompted media analysts to warn that "60 Minutes" could spiral into a ratings death dive—a stunning reversal for a program that has been a ratings juggernaut for decades.

The tensions underlying the purge run deeper than personnel disputes. Alfonsi, Vega, and Pelley have all accused CBS News management of "interfering in its editorial work and inserting bias in an effort to appease the Trump administration"—allegations the network has strenuously denied," the Post is reporting.

The report notes the stakes could hardly be higher. "60 Minutes" has been the rare CBS News program to thrive while competitors like "CBS Evening News" have languished behind ABC and NBC. The show averaged more than 9 million viewers per episode last season, a 9 percent increase from the prior year—making its current trajectory all the more catastrophic.

Current and former staffers expect conditions to deteriorate further. All attention now focuses on whether the remaining correspondents—Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, L. Jon Wertheim, and contributor Norah O'Donnell—will abandon ship. Stahl, Whitaker, and O'Donnell declined to respond to inquiries Wednesday, while Wertheim refused comment.

According to the Post, show production has effectively stalled. People with knowledge of the Wednesday atmosphere described a newsroom where "few people were working and the production had largely ground to a halt."

"Nick Bilton has no time to lose," one former CBS News correspondent told the Post. "The next season will be highly scrutinized and even though the show is on so-called hiatus, a lot of work for those September stories is done over the summer. He better have some damn good ideas!"

The obstacles appear insurmountable. "I don't see how they put a show on in the fall even if miraculously they cobble together a team," a former "60 Minutes" staffer said bluntly. "Not a single producer thinks they will have a correspondent to work with outside of Norah."

Even optimistic assessments are grim. Another former staffer acknowledged that even with new correspondents, "there's a 'sharp learning curve.'" The prediction: "I'd guess they can probably squeeze out a strong season opener and then the wheels will fall off. Week to week, it is a grind."

Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and former network television correspondent, characterized the threat as existential.

"This is the acid test for David Ellison, but unless he reverses course, I think 60 Minutes will die a slow, embarrassing death as the new management tries and fails to invent a new formula that works better than what's tried and true," Feldstein told the Post's Scott Nover.