Close to Christmas in 1968, the journalist Mike Wallace went to Atlanta, Georgia, to the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. Earlier that year, King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Now Wallace, filming a segment for a new magazine-style news program called “60 Minutes,” on CBS, sat on the King family’s handsome couch with one leg perched on the seat, looking somewhat ill at ease. A well-appointed Christmas tree feebly defied the air of sorrow in the room. Across from Wallace sat Coretta Scott King, the Reverend’s widow. The King kids were quiet and poised, letting the camera inspect their faces, putting on a show of mild bravery for the nice reporter and all the people out there watching at home. Wallace asked after the family. Was the season sad? Then, zooming out:
WALLACE: I think that some of us . . . wonder if the death of Martin Luther King didn’t leave the civil-rights movement, for a lot of people, leaderless, rudderless.
KING: I don’t think that this is so—I think that if we are looking for another Martin Luther King, we won’t find him. Because he comes once in a century? Maybe once in a thousand years. But there are many other persons now who will come forth, I believe. . . .
WALLACE: . . . We hear in the papers, see on television, more about the young Black militant leaders. We hear names like [Stokely] Carmichael and [H. Rap] Brown and [Eldridge] Cleaver and [Huey P.] Newton and [Bobby] Seale. And you begin to wonder if perhaps they aren’t getting more followers than some of the older civil-rights leaders.
King answered in her artful way, assuring Wallace that there were “many more people” who shared her husband’s commitment to nonviolent struggle than there were young Black radicals of various stripes ready to resort to violence.
The King-shaped moral vacuum had given Wallace a kind of civilizational anxiety. Without the charismatic clergyman, what kind of unruly Black-underclass anger would take the stage? That fear didn’t belong solely to Wallace. “60 Minutes” had come along at just the right time to draw a picture frame around a particularly perilous passage in the landscape of the country. Part of its purpose, from the beginning, was not only to deliver new facts but to interpret ragged events for a nervous audience of relatively prosperous, largely white viewers who shared Wallace’s concern about the shape and tenor of the future. That cohort’s curiosities and anxieties were, it seemed, the unspoken rationale for the new show’s existence. Could America, they all seemed to be asking vicariously, through Wallace’s stentorian voice, ever just be normal again?
The fifty-ninth season of “60 Minutes,” which premièred in September, arrives at a similarly disorienting juncture in the life of the American polity. CBS, the country’s unofficial home for geriatric entertainments—stuff like “NCIS” and the shuffling-zombie game show “The Price Is Right”—has become an unlikely protagonist in a morphing media scene. Last summer, its parent company, Paramount, completed a merger with Skydance Media, an outfit founded by David Ellison, an actor turned media mogul whose father, Larry Ellison, happens to be one of the richest people on the planet. Ellison fils’s most high-profile hiring decision was to enlist Bari Weiss—the former Times Opinion editor and founder of the center-right publication The Free Press—as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Weiss has her own particular vision of American and international normality. Last year, not long after assuming her role atop CBS News, she appeared on a panel at the conservative Jewish Leadership Conference. She understood her new job, she said, as an opportunity to “speak for the seventy-five per cent” of people on the center right and the center left, marginalizing figures like the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson. She wanted to invite into “the room”—the great national agora symbolized by CBS’s airwaves—eminences who could stand at the “forty-yard lines” of reasonable discourse. She’d recently hosted a debate between the permanently discontented lawyer and Epstein pen pal Alan Dershowitz and the conservative polemicist and former N.R.A. spokeswoman Dana Loesch. You know, people like that.
This deserving three-quarters of the population, as construed by Weiss, includes people who don’t believe in “the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be” but want to know “what’s actually going on in the world”—a world that “used to just be normal.” As my colleague Clare Malone has reported in this magazine, Weiss first came to public attention in college, as a consequence of her support for Israel and consistent denigrations of the Palestinian cause. But perhaps she has always, more fundamentally, been auditioning for a role as a propagandist for a dusty vision of a bygone postwar United States, whose faintly familiar personae and aging slogans masquerading as common sense—“individual responsibility,” “the American project,” “Alan Dershowitz”—are putting up a well-funded fight against the fiercer energies of the age.
You can detect the strain of the effort to erect this cardboard version of the country in the early episodes of the new “60 Minutes,” helmed by executive producer Nick Bilton, whom Weiss hired away from her old digs at the Times. Visually, the show looks a lot like it did before. Each hyper-competently produced segment opens with a journalist standing with wary authority like the Ghost of Christmas Future, inviting viewers to cross the threshold into some harrowing or heartening new way of apprehending reality. The first segment of the new season, hosted by Norah O’Donnell, was about a fighter pilot, code-named Bravo, whose plane was shot down over mountains in Iran. His interview with O’Donnell relates his story—a faulty parachute, a tough crash, a long bloody hike, and survival until he was rescued by an American plane—in a genuinely moving way. Pete Hegseth is interviewed, too, recalling his reaction to the news of Bravo’s crash—“Shit!”—and insuring that the tale is interpreted as an instance of American power wielded nobly and bravely, with a masculine, sporting élan. Early in the segment, O’Donnell calls the ongoing war with Iran “unpopular,” but the rest of the story does nothing to interrogate just why an American fighter jet was zooming through Iranian skies, and whether the exercise was, in the end, worth the very possible loss of Bravo’s life.
One of Bilton and Weiss’s signature new on-air hires is the conservative writer Ross Douthat, formerly an opinion columnist for the Times. His method is often to approach cultural or political phenomena, progressive or reactionary, with a mix of Gen X irony and sincere moralism which, by degrees, subtly shifts the frame of the discourse to the right.
A few episodes into the new season, Douthat interviewed the Republican senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina. Tillis is the rare Republican lawmaker who has put up some measure of resistance to Donald Trump, opposing the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Recently, he called Hegseth’s initial plan to publicly execute the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, “beyond disgusting.” Douthat’s interview portrays Tillis as a robust, independent-minded figure, the kind of guy you might dream up in a fugue state of acutely missing John McCain. At one point, Tillis dares Douthat to jump across the tracks of Congress’s private subway system. Douthat, not known for his athleticism, makes it across. So does, of course, the hale Tillis, whose physical fitness, at sixty-six, is mentioned more than once in the segment. Tillis, scrutinized in this very friendly way, seems like the ideal political representative of Weiss’s “seventy-five per cent,” a guardian of an order whose foundations have long since rotted away. In the version of America in which, say, Mitt Romney hadn’t been exiled from the good graces of the Republican base, Tillis might be gearing up for a successful, quite “normal” bid for the Presidency. As the real world stands, he is a man without an obvious wider constituency, whose highest feasible ambition might be the continued admiration of Douthat and Weiss.
On a recent episode, the longtime correspondent Lesley Stahl reported from the West Bank, where a group of Israeli shepherds called the Hilltop Youth have carried out a series of violent attacks against Palestinian families, attempting to take and settle their land by force. It’s an excellent report, framed by the imminent elections in Israel and the U.S., drawing an implicit portrait of an uncertain but surely bloody future. Soon after that episode aired, it was reported by the media newsletter Status that the in-house screenings for Stahl’s segment had grown “extraordinarily contentious,” with Weiss taking a “very, very hands-on” role in fisking the piece, causing Stahl to consider joining her onetime colleagues Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Scott Pelley (who have all been fired since Weiss took over) as former employees of “60 Minutes.” (CBS News has denied the Status report, and defended its own editorial rigor.)
The fracas makes sense: the war in Gaza, with its wake of corpses and depths of ongoing violence, suggests no neat, reassuring, or “normal” solutions. To move forward and, one day, make reparation would surely mean including voices that might have made Mike Wallace nervous, and perhaps fall well outside Weiss’s favored forty-yard lines. To make “60 Minutes” worth the cost of so much reliable prime-time air would be to admit that we will need to envision, together, somewhere down the line, a new world. ♦