60 Minutes

The new owners are talking fast and walking backwards; they know most viewers don't want a sacrosanct piece of Americana politicized.

I’m waiting for an October surprise. Not the last minute political rabbit-from-a-hat like Henry Kissinger’s infamous “Peace is at hand” speech in 1972 (it wasn’t), or the FBI director exhuming the investigation into Hillary’s email in 2016. No, the surprise I’m waiting for is Netflix announcing that it has hired the 60 Minutes refugees to mount a challenge to the “reimagined” 60 Minutes. That might be too kind a description; time will tell. Call it Netflix Presents, or something equally unimaginative.

If you look up “venerable” in the dictionary, don’t be surprised if the definition’s accompanying picture is the 60 Minutes logo. After all, “60” has been the number one or two television program for just about all of its 58 years.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the venerable. The show’s “reimagining” under the auspices of new CBS News Editor-in-Chief, conservative opinion maven Bari Weiss, has seen its best-known journalists like Anderson Cooper, leave voluntarily, or be fired like Tanya Simon, the longtime Executive Producer, and reporters Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega.

If you haven’t been following the huge changes at 60, here’s a quick review. First to bolster his Skydance Media, nepo-baby David Ellison set out to buy Paramount/CBS. He benefited from his father Larry’s enormous wealth. Larry founded Oracle, and has a controlling interest in TikTok, thanks to his friend, and the beneficiary of his uber-wealth, Donald Trump, on whose campaign he lavished about $45M in “dark money.”

Trump famously hates his late night critic, Steven Colbert, so, like in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy makes an offering of the Wicked Witch’s broom, Skydance got Shari Redstone, Paramount’s previous owner, to fire Colbert and donate $16M to Trump’s proposed library, in exchange for Trump dropping a libel suit based on Alfonsi’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Needless to say, the suit was frivolous and easily defended in court, but Shari wanted to sell the business quickly, and those were the terms.

Skids greased, the acquisition sailed through the FCC, the FTC, the DOJ, and other regulatory nuisances like a hot knife through butter. All it took was the President saying the Ellisons were friends of his and very good people.

Then Paramount’s new owners, Skydance, wanted to bulk up further and buy Warner Brothers Discovery to get the TV and film studio, its library, HBO, and CNN. Last December, Trump said how despicable the current owners of CNN were, and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over [CNN], the better.” All this had the unmistakably authoritarian look of government-controlled media.

Bari Weiss got under the hood, and began disassembling the team behind 60, hiring a new executive producer with no television of investigative experience. Now, she’s hired Russ Douthat away from the NY Times where he has been a conservative voice for 17 years. The signal, muted at first, is now a full-throated call for conservatives to rally around the new 60 Minutes.

Whether the broadcast will retain its ratings and credibility is currently unknowable. Time will tell. Of course the Ellisons and Weiss are free to do as they please with their businesses. 60 Minutes is not a public trust, even though it has felt that way ever since Mike Wallace chased his first three-piece-suited felon down the street with cameras rolling.

As a former broadcast programmer, I know that sometimes you have to give a thing up to make room for the next thing, but I’d play carefully with a vaunted and beloved institution like 60 Minutes.

Netflix also wanted WBD. They offered $82.7B for the Warner Bros. Studios, including HBO and CNN, but after agreeing to that number, WBD reneged in favor of the Paramount Skydance offer of $108B. Netflix famously said, “We want Warner Bros. Discovery, but not at any price.” That’s why I won’t be surprised to learn that Netflix has hired the refugees cast out by Weiss, and started their own investigative program.

Meanwhile, Netflix has indicated that because there’s not much subscriber growth left for the market-making streamer, they’ll need to find new ways to grow the company. Wall Street lives on growth, and public companies stand still at their own peril. It’s a shortsighted approach that values this quarter’s earnings over everything else.

It seems to me that by revamping 60 Minutes, what with the firings and voluntary departures based on the company’s stated desire to move the broadcast to the right, Skydance Paramount has exposed its flank to a hungry competitor.

Streaming is the future, and Netflix has nothing but money. It was left with a bad taste in its mouth after the WBD affair. Anderson, Alfonsi, Pelley, Vega, and Executive Producer Simon, make a very stable base for a Netflix run at investigative journalism.

©2026 Jon Sinton