Don’t Watch the Bari Weiss Version of ‘60 Minutes’

Even if the new version looks and sounds like the old show, remember that it’s now being run by people with a Trump-friendly political agenda and little respect for fact-based journalism.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

David Ellison and Bari Weiss are desperately hoping that you and millions of others will tune into their controversial version of 60 Minutes when it returns this month.

Don’t do it.

A lot is riding on their “revamp” of 60 Minutes, especially the debut show on Sunday, September 13. It’s been a raucous year of unprecedented upheaval at CBS with only one clear winner so far: Donald Trump. But keeping Trump happy with questionable personnel moves and a right-coded content shift has chased the CBS audience away in record numbers.

Neither Ellison or Weiss can afford for that to happen with their version of 60 Minutes. Both need a narrative shift and most importantly, a ratings win.

The Magic Number

Ellison and Weiss need 10 million viewers for the 60 Minutes debut episode to be considered a success, reports Oliver Darcy of Status. That’s the benchmark for success because it’s the number the fall 2025 60 Minutes debut show hit.

Darcy quoted one TV executive as saying, “It’s 10.03M or bust. If they fall short, they’re cooked.” Without those viewers, plus the social media clicks and web page views, it will be harder to justify their politically-motivated destruction of the legendary news magazine program.

Change the Channel

As a longtime broadcast journalist, I’m not in the habit of suggesting that people don’t watch (or read) the news. But I am doing that now.

I don’t want to play any part in boosting Weiss’s 60 Minutes scheme and I hope you don’t either. 60 Minutes, that long-respected pinnacle of broadcast journalism is dead, murdered because Trump hated the show. So even if the new version looks and sounds like the old show, remember that it’s now being run by people with a Trump-friendly political agenda and no respect for fact-based journalism.

This Sunday, when the late afternoon the Vikings and Packers NFL game ends, change the channel when 60 Minutes comes on. The episode will likely include a story of the L.A. Rams to hook football fans, but don’t fall for it. The New York Times reports there is also an interview with a pilot shot down over Iran. As interesting as that could be, don’t watch the show on streaming or YouTube and avoid viewing or clicking on the 60 Minutes segments or excerpts on TikTok, Instagram and beyond.

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Don’t Hate Watch

It’s also important not to hate watch the broadcast to look for signs of Weiss’ editorial meddling or that it, like the rest of CBS News, is falling hard. Here’s the thing about audience ratings: they don’t measure your feelings about the show, they only help estimate the number of viewers who tuned in. Eyeballs are eyeballs and they all count towards the audience ratings that will get trumpeted by CBS if they are significant, and explained away if they fall below expectations.

Listen, I get that you might be curious about the role of Ross Douthat, the right-wing former NYT opinion guy with zero TV news experience, but turn it off. No one needs primetime Ross Douthat. I talked to long time TV news executive Willie Chriesman about that head-scratching 60 Minutes hire.

He said:

“It’s unclear to me at this point what his role will be. Is he expected to be the next Scott Pelley or the next Andy Rooney? Or something else entirely? Perhaps the desire is to bring more ideological balance—or at least the appearance of it—to the program. But, up until now, there have been no blatantly political opinion writers placed in the role of 60 Minutes correspondent.”

But don’t take the bait. Like me, I’m betting you don’t want to do anything that throws a lifeline to Weiss and Ellison’s project to replace journalism with a political narrative.

The Trust Question

Much of this comes down to trust … or the lack of it, especially when you recall Weiss’ well established meddling in 60 Minutes content. How can you trust anything on the show now that you know about her prior efforts to change the content of news stories to include unverified information or to make them align with Trump talking points?

Three of the program’s top investigative reporters — Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Sharyn Alfonsi — have all made credible claims about Weiss trying to alter the content of their 60 Minutes pieces to make them more Trump-friendly. Of course, she ultimately fired all three, along with the top editors at 60 Minutes. And by all accounts, Weiss is now acting as the 60 Minutes boss. It’s not hard to imagine that Weiss’ editorial interference has only increased now that there are fewer journalists around to push back.

The Ellison Factor

There’s also the Ellison factor. David Ellison is in the middle of a nasty legal fight over the $110 billion mega-merger with Warner Brothers Discovery that includes its marquee news network — CNN. (I’ve written about that here.)

Independent journalism on cable TV becomes a lot harder to do if Ellison succeeds. 60 Minutes’ September premier falls just two weeks before Ellison and his father, Larry, will have to pay a $7 million per day penalty for not closing that deal. They literally cannot afford for the new 60 Minutes to fail, adding yet another PR disaster to the ledger.

If we’ve learned anything from this past year, it’s that David Ellison and Bari Weiss can’t be trusted with mainstream journalism. Except for the successful courtship of Trump, Ellison’s ownership of CBS is a disaster. As for Weiss, her CBS news track record is also littered with examples of political ideology taking precedence over objective news coverage.

Recently, my social media feed included a lot of angry posts from Canadians saying, “Stop saying you are on our side and do something about it.” Well, turning off 60 Minutes and fighting for America’s longstanding and democracy-serving habit of fact-based journalism is something we all can do. It’s as easy as spending Sunday night reading a book, going for a walk, or taking the grandkids to dinner.

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