The real story behind the 'murder' of 60 Minutes

Republican dismantles MAGA 'sabotage' of 60 Minutes for Trump’s ego

Last week, the broadcasting world was shocked by the sudden firing of two correspondents and key production staff at the legacy news program 60 Minutes. Now, the figure behind the shakeup — CBS News chief and MAGA media personality Bari Weiss — is being accused of attempting to “sabotage” the show for the benefit of President Donald Trump. While such accusations may be expected from liberals, even conservative voices are slamming the “shameful” decision. “There are many words that can be used to describe 60 Minutes: Venerable. August. Excellent. Important. Beloved,” writes longtime Republican strategist Steve Schmidt. “But since the purchase of CBS News by the Ellison family, another word belongs on the list: Sabotaged.”As Schmidt suggests, under its new ownership, CBS News — and as a result, 60 Minutes, which is part of CBS — has been reworked in a way that critics say is a blatant effort to support Trump’s political project. After its purchase, Weiss — an opinion journalist with no experience in broadcast news — was appointed to helm the organization, and since then she’s raised many eyebrows with her decisions. The latest involves the firing of anchors Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega and executive producer Tanya Simon, who were replaced by Nick Bilton, who, like Weiss, also has no background in TV news. This has prompted no shortage of outrage, including from those on the right. Says former Fox host Megyn Kelly, Weiss is “loathed” for her actions. And according to Schmidt, the program has been “assaulted with malicious intent by new corporate leadership that appears determined to gut one of the last remaining institutions in American journalism in order to satisfy a corrupt political arrangement with Donald Trump.”“The destruction isn’t accidental,” asserts Schmidt. “It’s deliberate. It’s strategic. It’s ideological. It’s transactional.” As he noted, 60 Minutes has long been known as a serious program where facts and credibility mattered. “That is what is being destroyed for no reason beyond the insatiability of Trump’s ego.”Shortly after the firings were announced, it was revealed that longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley had subsequently laid into Weiss and Bilton, accusing the former of trying to “murder” the show and arguing that the latter has “slender” qualifications for his new job. “Scott Pelley represents the tradition that built the program,” says Schmidt, explaining that he got to know him while staffing for Senator John McCain, whom Pelley interviewed. “There was no performance. There was no ideological hysteria. There was no narcissism. There was no branding exercise. There was no desperate attempt to become the center of the story. There was journalism. There was rigor. There was seriousness.” Schmidt notes that while Pelley has never made his politics obvious, “The same obviously can’t be said for Bari Weiss.”“Her ideological agenda radiates from every pore of her public conduct,” Schmidt claims. “Her loyalties plainly do not include CBS News, 60 Minutes, institutional integrity or the preservation of a shared factual reality. She’s not a steward. She’s a vandal. Additionally, she’s staggeringly incompetent.”Schmidt argues that while many viewers have tuned into 60 Minutes for decades, watching with a trust that was “earned through excellence, not algorithms,” and “through reporting, not branding,” “now Bari Weiss has effectively stolen something Americans love in order to help deliver profits to the son of one of the richest men in the world, while accommodating the demands of an American fascist who despises the First Amendment, and views journalism as an enemy to be subdued.”According to Schmidt, “America is living through a period during which many of its most important institutions are being hollowed out from within by weak people desperate for proximity to power, and terrified of losing money.” Furthermore, “What’s happening at CBS News isn’t merely a business story. It’s a warning story. It’s a story about how institutions collapse. Not all at once, but piece by piece. Compromise by compromise. Coward by coward.”“Americans should understand clearly: when journalism dies, corruption flourishes,” concludes Schmidt. “And that’s why what is happening right now at CBS News should outrage every American who still believes truth matters in a free society.”

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60 Minutes Star Accuses CBS Chief Bari Weiss of “Murdering” the Show

The fight inside 60 Minutes is tearing CBS News’s venerated broadcast to shreds.A staff editorial meeting reportedly flew off the rails Monday morning when longtime host Scott Pelley tore into Bari Weiss’s new pick to run the news magazine as its new executive producer: Nick Bilton, a former Vanity Fair writer with next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.Weiss announced Bilton’s hire the same day that she fired a large swath of the show’s crew, which some at 60 Minutes are referring to as “Black Thursday.” The axed staff include correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay Alfonsi’s report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.The meeting was intended to introduce Bilton to the show’s team, though Weiss herself was conspicuously absent. With the chief of CBS News missing, the meeting devolved into hostilities, including one particularly heated moment in which Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the show, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Status News.“Bari loves this institution,” Bilton told staffers during the meeting. “She loves 60 Minutes.”“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired?” He openly questioned Bilton’s credentials and said, “We don’t trust you.”CBS News managing editor Charles Forelle attempted to intervene in the exchange to no avail. The exchange reportedly left staffers wondering whether Pelley would resign from his post, reported Status.Bilton, nonetheless, did not have satisfactory answers for the producers and crew, according to two staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Post. At one point, he unintentionally made staffers laugh out loud when he claimed he would bring in people who are already capable of doing the work of a 60 Minutes correspondent, one of the most revered jobs in the industry.When asked if the show could expect more layoffs, Bilton said, “Not right now.”Weiss has only been in charge of CBS News for seven months, but her business decisions have already cratered its legendary reputation. Once the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and home to some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, the outlet is now making news for all of the wrong reasons.

The real reason the GOP tanked Trump's 'dumbest' grift

Ever since it was announced that the Trump administration would create a slush fund for the benefit of convicted January 6 rioters, Republicans have been unusually vocal with their criticism of President Donald Trump. In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, GOP resistance to the fund appears to have tanked it. By Tuesday afternoon, Republican Senators were telling reporters that they expected acting Attorney General Tood Blanche to confirm the fund’s end during a testimony later in the day, otherwise, it would further delay their make-or-break immigration budget reconciliation bill. “It was a nonstarter from the get go,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told NBC News. But according to Vox, Republican reasoning for opposing the fund may have had less to do with what is right or wrong, but hinged on public perception with the midterms looming. In order to learn why Republicans finally stood up to Trump, Vox “spoke with DC insiders on both sides of the aisle, as well as leading scholars of American politics. They told a fairly consistent story: one in which the awful election year politics of giving Trump a fund to pay out January 6 rioters, combined with the specific timing of a must-pass funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), forced usually deferential Republicans’ hands.”“We’re kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place right now,” said one Senate Republican aide on Monday. “There were dozens of senators that had concerns [on our side].” The major concern was that Democrats now had a powerful new weapon with which to attack the GOP, which is already expected to take substantial losses in the November midterms due to Trump’s historic unpopularity driven by the ongoing war with Iran and its resulting economic calamity. Suddenly, with Trump’s almost universally despised fund complicating a key Republican legislative priority, the party was finally forced to take decisive action to oppose the president. “The timing of it forces their hand,” said Matt Glassman, an expert on Congress at Georgetown University. “It can’t be ignored, because the administration chose to announce it at the dumbest possible time.” “The point is not that Congress has, all of a sudden, discovered its constitutional spine,” notes Vox. “It is still uncommon for Republicans to fight back against something Trump really wants, and many of his defeats there are symbolic. High-profile effective challenges to Trump remain quite rare. However, there is a difference between ‘quite rare’ and ‘unheard of,’ which is basically how Congress operated in the early months of Trump’s presidency. It seems that the specific ways he has gone about trying to consolidate his own power has, over time, created space for greater friction in Congress — or even actively generated pushback. And given the narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, it doesn’t take a lot of resistance to block a bill.”As Vox explains, this dynamic has offered Democrats opportunities to impede Trump’s agenda while the GOP is weakened electorally. Democrats are expected to reclaim the majority in at least the House later this year, which will make Trump's ability to consolidate power substantially weaker. “If Trump were a more competent authoritarian,” concludes Vox, “he might be using his remaining time controlling Congress to grab as much formal power as he could. Instead, he’s chosen to mismanage his relationship with Congress, a series of costly and time-consuming fights that could have been avoided with defter management. American democracy would be in far better shape if Republicans actually did care about stopping Trump’s power grabs as a matter of constitutional principle. They don’t, for the most part. But their instincts for political survival, and frustration with the White House, are starting to assert themselves in democratically valuable ways.”

Trump Taps Housing Chief Behind Revenge Quests as Top Intel Official

President Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence following Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation last week. Trump announced the move in a Truth Social post Tuesday morning, and said Pulte would keep his existing jobs as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as head of the Federal Housing and Finance Agency. “William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets, and over 10 Trillion Dollars at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, a substantial increase from where it was just 12 months ago,” Trump posted. It’s an odd choice for the sensitive position, which concerns foreign intelligence and would appear to require a military or intelligence background, which Pulte doesn’t have. Instead, he has built up a reputation of targeting Trump’s political enemies using his authority at the housing agency, and has become unpopular among Republican lawmakers for working his way into Trump’s inner circle. Last month, Pulte drew the attention of Democrats in Congress for a suspicious charity donation that may have funneled money into Trump’s pockets, and for sharing an AI image with the president depicting Trump as Jesus Christ. Trump then posted the image on his Truth Social platform, causing a backlash from across the political spectrum, particularly from Trump’s supporters on the Christian right.Pulte will now be holding a sensitive intelligence position while juggling his other positions. It’s more evidence that Trump prizes loyalty above competence and experience, but could also indicate that Trump is planning a more sinister use of Pulte’s authority. Gabbard was involved in investigating election fraud conspiracies during her tenure as Director of National Intelligence, and Pulte could pick up where she left off. This story has been updated.

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Trump drops $1.776 billion ‘weaponization’ fund, Charlie Kirk murder case opens up to cameras

President Trump is abandoning his controversial $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund after bipartisan opposition, court challenges, and pressure from Senate Republicans. Questions now remain about whether the rest of Trump’s massive IRS settlement will survive intact. Meanwhile, a Utah judge has handed down a major ruling in the Charlie Kirk murder case, allowing cameras in court...