{"id":211,"date":"2026-06-05T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=211"},"modified":"2026-06-05T17:40:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:40:00","slug":"whats-behind-the-corporate-pillaging-of-60-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

CBS News used to be a place where reporters won Emmys and got raises for telling the truth. This week, 60 Minutes<\/em> correspondent Scott Pelley got fired for it. At a staff meeting, the 68-year-old, 37-year-veteran of the network called out his new boss, executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley could not contain himself when Bilton said CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss \u201cloves this institution. She loves 60 Minutes<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The District 12 Candidate Nobody Is Talking About<\/a><\/p>\n

Pelley interrupted with controlled fury. \u201cShe is murdering 60 Minutes<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201cShe does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she\u2019s been doing exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pelley went on: \u201cShe has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she\u2019s made at the Evening News<\/em> have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?\u201d<\/p>\n

To illustrate his point, Pelley listed the 60 Minutes<\/em> staffers who had been fired on what is now known at their offices as Black Thursday. That day came in the aftermath of Weiss\u2019s decision to stop the planned broadcast of a story on the brutal conditions at El Salvador\u2019s Terrorism Containment Center (CECOT) where the United States sent Venezuelan migrants for detention after their apprehension by ICE. Weiss felt the story was not balanced, and sought to add a MAGA counterpoint to what 60 Minutes<\/em> already felt was a balanced, finished piece. 60 Minutes<\/em> correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi publicly criticized Weiss\u2019s decision and was fired.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been a journalist for 25 years,\u201d Bilton shot back. \u201cI\u2019ve sat across from incredibly powerful people like you have, and none of it intimidates me. OK? So you are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people.\u201d Bilton then proved exactly how not-at-all intimidated he was by bringing Pelley\u2019s outburst to the attention of Bari Weiss. Weiss accused Pelley of creating an unsafe work environment and insisted that he apologize. As this happened internally\u2014an audio recording of the meeting was leaked to media outlets the day of the confrontation. What began as a closed-door shouting match between a reporter and a senior executive\u2014a far-from-unprecedented occurrence in the history of journalism\u2014went public as national news. It raised the stakes considerably. Of course, Pelley refused to back down. He meant every word of it. With his unapologetic criticism now public, CBS fired him.<\/p>\n

Nothing says you won\u2019t be intimidated like firing someone for criticizing you. Pelley spent nearly four decades at CBS, reporting, sitting at the anchor desk, and making it to 60 Minutes<\/em> as a worthy successor to Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, and colleagues like Leslie Stahl. Pelley\u2019s firing comes less than a week after Steven Colbert\u2019s last episode aired and the affable, unremarkable Byron Allen has taken his place with his apolitical, sponsor-friendly show Comics Unleashed<\/em>. It also comes as reports went viral that CBS News was trying to woo right-wing bro podcaster Joe Rogan over to 60 Minutes<\/em>, in an attempt to connect with his vast listenership. (CBS now denies this.) A Rogan-branded 60 Minutes<\/em> would be the journalistic equivalent of Trump building a UFC octagon arena on the White House lawn. Why is all this happening at once?<\/p>\n

Yes, Pelley brought a level of reporting excellence and a historical relationship with 60 Minutes<\/em>\u2019 audience that can\u2019t be replaced\u2014but in the Trump 2.0 era, those qualities are a hindrance, not a help. People like Pelley tend to feel they know what they\u2019re talking about and question their bosses. Worse, other people listen to them\u2014a definite bug, not a feature for the MAGA model of public discourse.<\/p>\n

In CBS\u2019s brave new world, loyalty comes first\u2014namely, the kind Weiss shows to her employers and not her news division. As Pelley railed about Weiss\u2019 lack of credentials in New York, Republican senators cited the same issue as they balked at at the news of Trump\u2019s appointment of a new director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Pulte, 38, has no intelligence experience\u2014a first-order disqualification in the past that roughly equates to a Harvard PhD for the country\u2019s MAGA leadership caste. His chief qualification for the job is a singular loyalty to Trump\u2014the same quality we saw on display from the CBS suits who gave Simon and Alfonsi the boot for their expose on CECOT abuses and then dismissed Pelley for talking back to senior executives. It means not only does Pulte not question; he doesn\u2019t really have the capacity to question.<\/p>\n

Read more A Personal TomDispatch Farewell<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe that Bilton and Weiss acted alone when they sent a senior reporter and CBS icon like Pelley packing. 60 Minutes<\/em> is the most highly rated news show on television. It\u2019s racked up 4 million YouTube<\/em> subscribers. Pelley is a large factor in that success. As Dan Rather recently wrote, \u201cBari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, is a bit player in this drama, executing decisions that are made far above her pay grade.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to divine who the players \u201cfar above her pay grade\u201d are; Rather is most likely referencing the owners of CBS, the Ellison family. Recently actor Mark Ruffalo, a vocal opponent and organizer against the Ellison\u2019s mammoth buyout of Warner Bros. and a pro-Palestinian activist, came to a similar conclusion on the I\u2019ve Had It<\/em> podcast. \u201cTo quote one prominent agent whose name I won\u2019t divulge here,\u201d Ruffalo said, \u201cthese are some vindictive motherfuckers, the Ellisons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruffalo went on to talk about the bid from Paramount-CBS to acquire Warner Bros., a deal that has not yet been sealed. The buyout would give the Ellisons control of two movie studios, CBS and CNN, and a host of other cable channels. Ruffalo has organized a petition of artists to oppose the merger, citing the jobs to be sacrificed, the weakened leverage of unions before the Ellisons\u2019 mega-conglomerate, the loss of financial backers for artists, and decreasing diversity of movies getting made. <\/p>\n

As the Ellisons have parted ways with everyone from Taylor Sheridan to Anderson Cooper, it\u2019s clear that stellar talents are easily expendable in pursuit of this megadeal. What Pelley was up against on the East Coast is what Ruffalo opposes from the west. Besides the huge hits about to be taken in the entertainment industry, Ruffalo also sees what he calls \u201cthe degradation of journalism through political pressure.\u201d Of a recent 60 Minutes<\/em> interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, where Netanyahu was given a choice of interviewers between Leslie Stahl and Major Garret (Bibi chose Garrett), Ruffalo said, \u201cHe would have never been on 60 Minutes<\/em> outside of this regime.\u2026 that\u2019s another thing that people really understand, there\u2019s a whole other part of this, which is the journalists are starting to sign on. We have journalists who are coming out against this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruffalo, like Pelley, has clearly reached a breaking point. \u201cI\u2019m not doing this because I\u2019m fearless,\u201d he explained to the hosts of I\u2019ve Had It<\/em>. \u201cI\u2019m doing this because I know we have to. And I know that no matter what, if I don\u2019t speak out, it\u2019s the same outcome. I\u2019m already on a list, I\u2019m already not a friend of these people. And so, you\u2019re either gonna fight or you\u2019re gonna lay down.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Ellisons court the administration\u2019s approval of their deal, the craven loyalty Trump demands from his cabinet appointees continues to disfigure great cultural and media institutions of our time. If Trump can\u2019t get his name onto everything he wants, he\u2019ll settle for the next best thing: leaving a greasy orange stain on everything he touches.<\/p>\n

Read more The District 12 Candidate Nobody Is Talking About<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat\u2019s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=211\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What\u2019s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=211\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-05T17:40:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"What\u2019s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-05T17:40:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211\"},\"wordCount\":1315,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/ef39edd62dec05ca2b2b07a07b957420.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Economy\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=211\",\"name\":\"What\u2019s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d - 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