The Clock Is Ticking
The evisceration of “60 Minutes” isn’t about ratings or profits, it's about politics and propaganda
For those of you who seek the truth in these troubled times, what just happened at “60 Minutes” is a 5-alarm fire. But this fire was not accidental. It was arson, and Donald Trump lit the fuse.
On Thursday, Bari Weiss, the Trump-friendly opinion columnist put in charge of CBS News, took a match to “60 Minutes” as we know it. She fired two top executives of the broadcast and two correspondents and then hired a new executive producer with no broadcast television experience.
Why? The timing might seem odd, but, of course, it’s how Trump & Co. operate.
“60 Minutes” just finished its 58th season with a couple of Emmy wins but, more importantly, with viewers’ trust. It’s long been the highest-rated news program on network television, and this year the numbers were up.
According to Oliver Darcy of Status, “60 Minutes” averaged 9.1 million viewers per week, a 9% increase over last season. On social media, Status reports, the broadcast added 17 million new followers across platforms and generated a staggering 2.5 billion views.
If anyone else was at the helm of the company or the country, this would be celebrated as a banner year at the venerated news institution. Everyone should get a raise and an extra week off. Instead, this citadel of independent journalism is being destroyed, another victim of Trump’s vengeance campaign.
Because he can’t handle the truth, Trump hates the program and has long called for its demise.
I reported on Trump’s first run for president back in 1999 on “60 Minutes.” It was a tough but fair piece, and he hated it. Was Trump really running for president back then, or was it a publicity stunt to make money? We could easily ask the same question today. You will recognize some of the vitriol that’s become Trump’s trademark. Watch it here.
Over the years, “60 Minutes” has reported many hard-hitting stories on Trump, much to his chagrin. He walked out on a Leslie Stahl interview a few years ago.
Now, all these years later, Trump has leverage and he’s using it to destroy an American institution, a needed check on power and a big-time money maker in a fading industry, where it is increasingly difficult to be profitable. We don’t have a smoking gun, but I’d bet the house Trump let it be known he wanted changes.
And David Ellison no doubt jumped to comply. He is the chairman and CEO of Paramount, the new parent company of CBS. He and his father, Larry Ellison, the second richest person in America, need Trump as they seek to get even richer by acquiring another big Hollywood property: Warner Bros.
That’s a $110 billion deal for a family who are big fans of Trump. David recently hosted the president at a dinner in Washington D.C., which Weiss also attended. As Darcy wrote for Status, “It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to connect the dots.”
In her memo to staff justifying the bloodletting at “60 Minutes,” Weiss wrote, “We want stories that break news, expose wrongdoing, widen public understanding, and force accountability from every institution and every center of power. We want journalism that is surprising, agenda-setting, and impossible to ignore.”
This is nonsense. What does she think “60 Minutes” has been doing for the last six decades?
The lesson here is not about ratings or profitability. “60 Minutes” has both. This is about making CBS part of a growing right-wing media machine. And if Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. is approved, CNN could suffer the same fate.
Cecilia Vega, the first Latina correspondent at “60 Minutes,” was fired yesterday along with Sharyn Alfonsi. They are two courageous reporters who have my respect and admiration.
Vega, in a note to colleagues after she learned of her firing, wrote, “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. This is censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the program and dangerous for democracy.”
We need great journalism now more than ever. We need journalists with guts and the financial backing to report important stories. And there is plenty to report.
We have never witnessed governmental corruption of this magnitude — a president lining his pockets, a president with his own Justice Department whose purpose is to settle scores for the boss. The days of lounging on the couch while watching tough, investigative journalism on “60 Minutes” for free on CBS may be done.
But the spirit of the old “60 Minutes” and CBS News lives on. It is a beacon, a symbol that the country has got to take a stand and keep reminding each other that democracy cannot survive, much less thrive, under this level of big corporation and big government interference and intimidation in the news.
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No matter how you subscribe, I thank you for reading.
Stay Steady,
Dan
At least, thank you, Dan Rather, for telling it like it is. I trust you and Heather Cox Richardson. Continue the Steady course!
A story for you, to show that there is still plenty of light in this world:
The Widower—Local News Story
When Bud Caldwell's wife Betty passed away after 55 years of marriage, he dedicated a park bench to her, taking daisies to her memorial whenever he could. That proved difficult in the winter, when the walkway in the park was often slick with ice and snow.
But one day, that changed, when city workers Jerrod Ebert and Kevin Schultz saw Caldwell parking near the snow bank. "It took us both back a little bit thinking, my gosh, his devotion is that strong that he still comes when he can't make it to the bench even," Ebert told CBS. The two men began going to the park and shoveling the walkway daily, even though no one would be walking on it other than Caldwell. "One day I pulled up there and there's the walk shoveled," Caldwell told CBS. He was so touched, he said, "My knees about buckled on me."
Ebert explained, "We were just doing what we felt was our job. Some intuition, be it divine or otherwise, says this is why you're here — to help one another."