After CBS News fired the leadership and several correspondents of the flagship U.S. news program “60 Minutes,” I co-wrote an open letter to David Ellison, CEO of CBS' parent company Paramount-Skydance, arguing that "the wholesale dismissal of editorial management, without a public pledge to maintain the values, standards, and traditions of this program, puts the legacy of ‘60 Minutes’ in jeopardy."
The letter was signed by several dozen former network producers, as well as former “60 Minutes” correspondents Dan Rather, Steve Kroft, and Katie Couric, prominent documentary filmmakers, writers, and celebrities.
"What is at stake," the letter argues, "is not just the future of the most important and enduring television journalism program in this country, but the future of free and independent press in America."
The drama unfolding at CBS News is what happens when the "move fast and break things" ethos collides with a century-old institution that was central to inventing the genre of broadcast journalism. The backstory of the chaos at “60 Minutes,” and of this letter campaign, offers a window into something larger: how corporate consolidation, audience alienation, and political identity have become so entangled in American media that the line between editorial judgment and ideological appeasement is no longer clear.
The trouble began last year, on the Sunday before Christmas, when an episode of “60 Minutes” was scheduled to air featuring interviews with Venezuelan migrants who had been deported to El Salvador's maximum-security CECOT prison. After the piece was announced and promoted, the network's newly installed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled it, claiming it "was not ready," despite the detailed vetting it had already undergone by veterans at the show. Her key argument was that no one from the Trump administration appeared in the piece — although the correspondent and producer had clearly made efforts to get comments, which were rebuffed by the government.
The move was widely seen as a shot across the bow to the 57-year-old newsmagazine, an unprecedented exertion of editorial control by Weiss, a conservative pundit brought in to CBS News with no television experience. After a brief stint as a columnist at The New York Times — which she left, claiming her editorial independence was being curtailed — Weiss had founded The Free Press, a heterodox-right digital news and opinion site. When Skydance bought Paramount and its subsidiary CBS, the company also acquired Weiss’ news site for $150 million and brought her in to lead a reimagining of the news division. Halting the CECOT story was her first bold step. The story eventually aired nearly a month later, after correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi recorded a new introduction and conclusion incorporating White House and Department of Homeland Security statements that had not appeared in the original version.
Shortly after news of the pulled story broke, my phone rang. It was Lowell Bergman, the legendary former “60 Minutes” producer whose own battle with CBS News during a previous corporate acquisition became the subject of the film “The Insider,” about the fight in the 1990s to get a controversial interview with a tobacco industry whistleblower on the air despite network concerns that a threatened lawsuit could tank the sale of CBS at the time. Bergman saw the parallels immediately. "What are we going to do about it?" he asked.
I had also been a producer at “60 Minutes” and saw some parallels of my own. As a Hungarian citizen who began my career in Budapest shortly after the end of Soviet rule, I had known Viktor Orbán long before his transformation into an autocrat. In 2012, as he began dismantling the country's independent media landscape, I felt compelled to write to him, reminding him that "a vibrant media is a vital component of the kind of free and open society you championed in your early days." I never imagined that I would feel that same compulsion about an American news institution.
Together, during the week of Christmas, Bergman and I drafted a letter to Ellison, warning that Weiss' interference in the CECOT story "signals a breakdown in editorial oversight, and risks setting a dangerous precedent in a country that has traditionally valued press freedom." Within hours, it had dozens of signatures from prominent media figures.
Then the New York Post mistakenly reported that current — not former — CBS News staff had organized the campaign, implying a palace coup was brewing inside the network. Leadership at “60 Minutes” asked us to stand down, believing it could address the editorial interference internally without the added noise of a public campaign. We pulled the signature form offline — but not before our letter had been infiltrated by trolls, with comments like "This letter is stupid" and "I stand with Bari!”
I emailed every one of the antagonistic signatories with an invitation to talk, and many took me up on the offer. What I found surprised me. They were not the angry partisans I expected. They were mostly smart, moderate Americans who felt mainstream media no longer resonated with their values. One told me he had grown up in the "Walter Cronkite era," when he could trust what he heard from CBS, but that era was long gone. He admitted he was no fan of Donald Trump, but felt the network had tilted so far against the president that it had become openly hostile. "What I think Ellison and Weiss are trying to do is get a little bit more of that balance." Another said she was frustrated by the “woke” coverage in news, but was equally lost in the world of right-wing ideologues like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. "I don't know what to believe anymore." Several mentioned that their alignment with Weiss was rooted in her steadfast support of Israel, and that they believed CBS News had shown anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza.
The leadership of the show had asked us last year to trust that it could make that case internally, but what Weiss did was what corporate-minded editors tend to do when internal resistance proves inconvenient: she cleared the room.
My old boss Don Hewitt built “60 Minutes” on the premise that Americans deserved to be surprised, challenged, and occasionally unsettled by what they saw on Sunday nights — that a mass audience could handle complexity, nuance, and inconvenient truth. The people who reacted negatively to our letter, for all their frustration, were not wrong that something has been lost in the relationship between legacy journalism and the audiences we once served. But the answer to that loss is not an editor-in-chief imported from the opinion press to clear out the journalists who push back. It is a recommitment to exactly the kind of journalism that made “60 Minutes” great in the first place.
The leadership of the show had asked us last year to trust that it could make that case internally, but what Weiss did was what corporate-minded editors tend to do when internal resistance proves inconvenient: she cleared the room.
After the "black Thursday massacre" — as now-fired correspondent Scott Pelley described the recent clearing of the show's leadership — Bergman and I revised and revived our letter and went ahead with our direct outreach to Ellison. What we asked of him was not complicated:
Acquiring CBS News came with a legal requirement to serve the public interest, avoid political interference, and maintain editorial independence. Institutional trust is not transferred through ownership. … We urge you to send a clear message to your staff, your viewers, and the broader public that you respect and value editorial independence and press freedom.
Six decades of “60 Minutes” were built on an implicit and sacred obligation to the public. That obligation now rests with David Ellison. Last Sunday, he finally broke his silence with a reported private phone call to Lesley Stahl, one of three correspondents who chose to stay after the purge. This was not the public pledge we had asked for, but it’s more than the network’s leadership has offered to date, and perhaps a first step towards reassuring the public that CBS News will return to its fundamental commitment to the public interest, not the political moment.
Peter W. Klein is a former network news producer and executive and is the founder of the Global Reporting Centre.