When CBS News’ editor-in-chief Bari Weiss formally introduced executive producer Nick Bilton to steer “60 Minutes” into the future, the former writer on HBO’s “The Idol” sent a letter to his staff promising to “lead this show, not preserve it under glass.”
“I have a notebook full of ideas,” Bilton said. “Some are about the show itself. Some are about the next generation of correspondents. Some are about the strange fact that we produce one extraordinary hour for one night a week in a world that consumes content around the clock. I’m excited to share them.”
That excitement has not materialized onscreen. Not through five episodes, anyway.
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For all the posturing around America’s No. 1 news program for 52 straight years needing a new direction, the latest season has shown scant evidence of what that new direction might be. The initial few months of Weiss and Hilton’s “60 Minutes” look a lot like the last 50 years of the classic “60 Minutes.” Perhaps that uniformity stems from pushback faced by the new regime, internally and externally, which led to assurances from the co-founder of The Free Press and her chosen EP that the show would “stay exactly like it is for now.”
But as ratings plummet and controversies rise, one has to wonder when these grand ideas to save “60 Minutes” might manifest. If the series wasn’t an “ice cube that is melting” before, it’s certainly feeling the heat now. So what’s being done to cool things down?
Using Bilton’s own blueprint — his “notebook of ideas” — let’s start with the changes we can see so far, which aren’t that easy to spot. Do you think many returning viewers clocked the alterations to the opening stopwatch? The cropping is tighter. Less of the watch-face is shown. And instead of “60 Minutes” appearing in a white font on a red background, it’s now in a red font on a white background.
Another brazen shift comes in how stories are introduced: Before, the lead reporter sat in front of a rectangular digital backdrop that looked like an open book. Now, the lead reporter sits in front of a rectangular digital backdrop that looks like… nothing. It’s just a screen. Or maybe an e-reader?
To be fair, a segment in the third episode kicks off with an attention-grabbing switcheroo: An AI-generated version of contributor Jon Wertheim gives the intro, before the real reporter walks out to explain the reason behind the stunt. (Their story, titled “Who needs humans?,” covers AI’s impact on the workforce.) But anyone fooled by Wertheim’s CGI avatar either wasn’t watching closely or thought the host had suddenly grown mutant fingers and a developed a wobbly eye.
Wertheim’s report also featured walk-and-talk shots, a standard technique (on “60 Minutes” and elsewhere) used to liven up static interviews, but one that Bilton said he wanted to avoid this season. Elsewhere, Bilton revived a retired series staple: the hidden-camera interview, which was used in the premiere’s report on President Trump’s “Pardon Economy.”
A lot of the old and less of the new doesn’t add up to significant change, let alone a surefire way to avoid purported extinction. Perhaps Weiss and Bilton are drawing from Jack Donaghy’s idea notebook, and the grand plan is to “make it 1997 again through science and magic.” Or maybe it’s not about altering the package as much as who’s delivering it, like Bilton mentioned in his second “idea.”
New correspondent Ross Douthat earned some of the show’s rare positive headlines when he landed an interview with Patrick Clancy. But where others may have heard pensive, sensitive questions fashioned for a man who’s been put through the ringer, online and off, I saw a reporter without the requisite patience and attentiveness to push a much-hyped interview beyond expectations. While sitting in a playground built as memorial for his dead children, Clancy chokes up recalling recurring dreams of his ex-wife. Douthat, meanwhile, can be seen tapping his leg and smiling.
Active listening is a skill, and Douthat rarely feels present. He’s awkward and terse, stilted and inexpressive. If his smile is meant to be reassuring, it comes off as clumsy, and the tapping is just plain rude.
No matter how you read Douthat’s comportment (his garbled narration, slouched posture, and rumpled suit don’t exactly scream “professional”), there’s no reason to assume he’s why “60 Minutes” — once the most respected name in news — booked a sought-after subject like Clancy, just as there’s no reason to believe his addition to the team is the trollish stewardship needed to court younger viewers or retain older ones. (There is reason to believe handing him a position on “60 Minutes” helped transfer his popular conservative print column from The New York Times to the Weiss-run Free Press — the reason being, that’s exactly what happened.)
As for the other new contributors, only one has issued a report: Ariel Levy, whose profile on Sacha Baron Cohen capped the latest episode. In five weeks, Sebastian Junger, Gianna Toboni, and Trevor Phillips have only appeared during “The Last Minute,” the closing segment that typically updates old stories or teases new ones. Their seconds-long spiels have touched on topical news instead, providing brief summaries of subjects like the protests in Europe and the war in Ukraine, as if long-form journalism is incomplete without a quick nod to the daily headlines.
That just leaves Bilton’s last idea: the “strange fact” that “60 Minutes” only airs “one night a week in a world that consumes content around the clock.” What he means by this is vague, even compared to his other unspecified ideas, which makes it even more difficult to imagine how it might be realized.
No spinoffs or extensions of “60 Minutes” have been announced, and its social media pages are comparable to previous years. YouTube features individual segments, full episodes, and archival content. TikTok hosts similar footage, albeit clipped for vertical video and treated with title cards. X is filled with a handful of videos every day, just as it was before Bilton’s hiring. (Based on a cursory scroll, previous social posts led with popular contributors like Anderson Cooper, whereas current stories — now without those popular contributors — tend to lead with the subjects.)
Perhaps pioneering new media strategies and must-see additional programming are still on the way, but for now, Bilton’s notebook of ideas has yet to yield appreciable results. The ratings, spun positively, are dependent on a good NFL lead-in.
Seen plainly, they’re setting record lows. Meanwhile, “60 Minutes” still looks like “60 Minutes”: No changes in these first five episodes could be expected to entice fresh viewers to tune in or convince alienated viewers to reconsider.
So, as a CBS senior staffer put it, “Why did you have to fire everyone to get a vaguely passable facsimile” of the original show?
Enter the 800-pound gorilla in any article about a Weiss-run “60 Minutes,” aka what really worries longtime viewers, true-blue journalists, and any honest supporter of the First Amendment: Rather than superficial changes to how the newsroom’s stories are shared, will there be an ideological shift in how those stories are reported — or what stories are reported at all?
Weiss, who’s nearly as proud of her conservatism as she is of her Zionism, validated those fears from the jump. The David Ellison-appointee (who has a fan in Donald Trump) reportedly introduced herself to “60 Minutes” producers by asking, “Why does the country think you’re biased?” Then she spiked a story critical of the Trump administration and, six months later, fired the venerated contributor Scott Pelley after he accused her of “murdering” the program. Her tenure is only possible because Ellison acquired CBS’ parent company, Paramount, which, in turn, only seemed possible because the network settled a controversial lawsuit against “60 Minutes” brought on by President Trump.
And yet “60 Minutes” — the country’s highest-rated news program for five decades — is what Americans consider biased?
Perhaps there’s an argument for bias now, when the only framing of the president’s “deeply unpopular” war in Iran is under the flattering guise of saving a soldier from behind enemy lines (Episode 1, “Shot Down Over Iran”). Or when Douthat helped Republican Senator Thom Tillis sell copies of his book by praising him for voting along party lines while “talking and maneuvering like a maverick” (Episode 3, “The Thom Tillis Tightrope”). Or when the best, most substantial story of the season (Episode 4, “Lost Sheep”) led to reports of interference that pushed Lesley Stahl to “the brink of quitting.”
These are the only biases, the only changes, viewers can see. Maybe more are coming. Or maybe the steady, unobtrusive creep of conservatism has been the idea all along.