The Weiss Freight Train Finally Hits ’60 Minutes’

Hey. Now this is the kind of trainwreck I can sit mesmerized on the couch watching for hours.

Back in one of his early April Final Word posts, the Boss Man had a little note about rumored coming attractions at the all-seeing CBS eye.

NY Post: CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is poised for a major shakeup at “60 Minutes” — with layoffs slated for this summer that could engulf some of the show’s top talent and producers, The Post has learned.

…Ed: She needs to focus on restoring its credibility. 60 Minutes owns the two worst journalistic failures at CBS and potentially in television news: Rathergate in 2004 and the attempt to boost Kamala Harris in 2024 through selective editing. Paramount paid millions of dollars for the latter. 60 Minutes should have been Weiss’ first target for reforms.

We all had a bad case of ‘Don’t TEASE ME, bro!’ waiting on something, anything to happen after that, and…crickets.

Until there was a notable non-contract renewal announcement yesterday, and it couldn’t happen to a more worthy, vile partisan shrieker.

CBS declined the privilege of continuing Sharon Alfonsi’s employment past the day on her current piece of paper, which was *checks notes* this past Saturday.

Oops, and…

AU REVIOR

That’s what happens to prima donnas who can’t get along with the new boss.

And she was outrageously biased–even worse than Stahl, who also needs to go.@60Minutes is long overdue for a deep housecleaning. Keep going, @bariweiss .

— RedBeard (@PirateBeerd) May 28, 2026

This one was not really a surprise, as Alfonsi wrote a blistering email to all her colleagues when Weiss tanked her December CECOT story (Ed covered the episode surrounding the story here), meant to depict the Trump administration in quite the worst light possible for its treatment of illegal alien deportees.

Oh, go figure, right?

The problems arising from Alfonsi’s reporting were pretty cut and dry, however she tried to blame the incoming Paramount management and Bari Weiss’s kowtowing to administration pressure. Alfonsi had refused to use the Trump officials’ responses to her questions in the piece, and then lied about ever having received them to begin with. Again, the Boss Man had all the receipts, and they are fugly.

So, I can only figure that it was easier in the short time left on the trouble-maker’s contract to simply let it lapse, rather than fire her with only five months left to go and risk giving Alfonsi a bigger platform for bellyaching.

As it is, she’s been picking up ‘profile in courage’ awards just for being a lying turd and getting caught…

The veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi expressed concern about “the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear” at CBS News and her uncertainty about whether she will keep her job after she pushed back on a directive to change her December segment on Venezuelans who were sent to the Cecot prison in El Salvador.

Alfonsi spoke about the incident for the first time on Thursday evening after receiving the Ridenhour prize for courage at the National Press Club in Washington. Her comments come as the Trump administration has piled pressure on US media and follow the decision by the CBS News editor, Bari Weiss, to shelve the segment on the flagship news program.

Alfonsi had alleged at the time that Weiss had “spiked” the story for political purposes, a significant accusation of journalistic impropriety. Weiss argued that the segment was delayed because it did not sufficiently include the perspective of the Trump administration.

…but that’s how the game is played.

Don’t let the door hitcha, etc., etc.

Remember Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent who once botched an embarrassing attempt at a hit piece on Florida governor Ron DeSantis only to later publicly complain about CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss’s decision to delay broadcasting her story on Trump deportation… pic.twitter.com/RIJdQlx4wd

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 28, 2026

However ‘chilling’ the message ‘to the whole newsroom.’

Oh, the drama.

‼️Breaking NY Times ‼️
Sharyn Alfonsi’s CBS contract was NOT renewed Saturday after her CECOT piece in El Salvador was pulled from the air by Bari Weiss.

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Ms. Alfonsi said. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a… pic.twitter.com/pvmpdQhgSd

— Anna Baxter 🇺🇸✌🏻 (@MsAnnaBaxter) May 27, 2026

…“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Ms. Alfonsi said. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.” Ms. Alfonsi remains employed at CBS, but with no contract in place, she said she had no expectation of returning to “60 Minutes.” 

“I’m not resigning,” she said. “If they want me gone because I did my job, they’ll have to fire me.”

Senior 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens resigned in April with a big mad over having his Gaza temper tantrum segments truncated, so the cast of disreputable characters was gradually being weaned, with still little sign of that major shake-up that was so anticipated by the rest of us.

Then today… well, hello.

60 Minutes ‘ executive producer Tanya Simon is g-o-n-e, replaced by a ‘But we don’t know that guy!!!‘

Breaking News: Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, replaced the top producer of “60 Minutes” with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and documentarian who has never worked in traditional broadcast news. https://t.co/R9qOq8uqOw

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 28, 2026

As is correspondent, Cecilia Vega.

SCOOP: Bari Weiss is preparing to announce broad-sweeping changes at 60 MINUTES *today*…

Sharyn Alfonsi has been fired

Tanya Simon, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, has also been fired, per source

More to come…@PuckNews

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 28, 2026

The Bari broom is out, and everyone’s wondering who gets swept up next.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss shook up the TV-news industry’s most-watched and best-regarded property Thursday, ousting the program’s two most senior executive producers, Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailoivich, along with correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, according to two people familiar with the matter.

CBS News named Nick Bilton, a former technology columnist at The New York Times and a contributor at Vanity Fair as the new executive producer of the program, adding a degree of uncertainty to the next steps of a series that generated $206.3 million in advertising in 2024, according to Guideline, a tracker of ad spending. It remained unclear on Thursday whether others among the show’s production and correspondent staff might be cut in future days.

And if Weiss can ‘pull it off.’

…Despite the turmoil, there has been a sense within CBS News that “60 Minutes” needed to be made more a part of the overall news division and turbocharged for an era in which people get their news in shorter segments and via social and digital media. In 2027, the show is slated to leave its current offices in New York and be housed alongside the rest of CBS News. There has also been some hand-wringing over whether the program has grown too genteel and whether it needs more of what former correspondent Mike Wallace once provided: a little investigative moxie and confrontation.

The question is whether Weiss and Bilton call pull it all off. A radical overhaul of “60 Minutes” could serve to alienate viewers who have come to expect three longform stories and a mix of investigations, profiles and intriguing features. The program in one instance might hold a politician under tight scrutiny in an uncomfortable moment and might take viewers to a remote corner of the world in another.

As a longtime CBS Evening News suffering viewer, I can say without any hesitation (and I know major dad backs me up on this as we were just marveling at it), that the changes to that broadcast in the few short months since the switchover have been tangible, beneficial, and most welcome after all the years of vicious partisan haranguing from the anchors, especially that viperous crone Norah O’Donnell. 

Tony Doukopil is so personable, and the lefty tilt is so diminished that it has been the totally remade broadcast we never thought to see. Of course, there are the eyeball rolls that still happen – I mean, come on. But overall, it’s a good half-hour in the evening spent while getting dinner ready.

And it’s still in its infancy.

So if Weiss can work any of that transformation magic on the stodgy old monster that 60 Minutes became, then she, truly, is worth every dime and more to whoever signs that check.

But the promised reformation is underway, and the entrenched inhabitants are going to snarl and resist or be forced out, and it is not a comfortable world out there for hacktastic media propaganda masters anymore.

They might have to chill out a little if they want another gig somewhere, because there are lots of other resumees in the queue to compete with.

Sucks when the time changes and it turns out to be your clock that was ticking.

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