Following months of tumult over CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s hiring of executive producer Nick Bilton and firing of top on-air talent Sharyn Alfonsi, Scott Pelley, and Cecilia Vega (and behind the camera), CBS’s 60 Minutes premieres a new season Sunday on the heels of a NewsBusters analysis that found, over the past six seasons, their political stories have skewed heavily to the left by a five-to-one margin.
A NewsBusters analysis discovered an overwhelming disparity in story selection, with the show producing 78 liberal stories, including many anti-conservative and anti-Trump stories, versus just 16 conservative stories.
The liberal leanings of the show were especially clear during and after presidential election years, such as in Season 53 (2020/21) and Season 57 (2024/25).
NEW STUDY: Over the past 6 seasons of CBS's 60 Minutes, the Sunday magazine show's politics-related segments had an overwhelming 5-to-1 bias in favor of liberal stories compared to conservative ones.
The numbers: 78 Liberal Stories vs. 16 Conservative Stories. pic.twitter.com/PUqxuUOomq— Nick (@nspin310) September 9, 2026
Key Findings
- In Season 53, 60 Minutes had 17 liberal politically-related stories dominated by anti-Trump stories before and after the election, including glowing profiles on new Biden administration members, like then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
- In Season 57, during the 2024 Presidential Election and ensuing Trump Transition, the liberal bias continued with 20 stories exemplifying liberal and anti-Trump agendas on topics like January 6, which opened the fall 2024 season with Pelley, or a story a week before the election from Vega that negatively portrayed now-Border Czar Tom Homan's deportation plans. The number of conservative stories that season: just three.
- For the other seasons analyzed, there was a similar pattern observed up until the most recent season, when Weiss took over. The 2021/22 season comprised nine liberal stories and one conservative story. The 2022/23 season had the same number of liberal stories, nine, but added one more conservative story, bringing the tally to nine-to-two.
- The most recent season had the bias ratio inch down slightly, as in 2025/26, 30 percent of stories there were conservative-leaning. Even with the increase, there was still more than double the amount of liberal stories compared to conservative stories.
Here are some highlights:
Anti-Trump
The past decade of news has been dominated by President Trump and his presidential bids. Over the past six years of 60 Minutes, he, his administration, or people related to him have been a near-constant focus.
For example, the first story of the 2020/21 season was “Mr. Woodward? The President,” which featured Pelley asking journalist Bob Woodward, “You reach an editorial conclusion at the end of this book, something that reporters are not supposed to do.” Woodward replies, “Yes. I say the President is the wrong man for the job.”
The aftermath of the 2020 election was also a large focus of 60 Minutes for the four years of a non-Trump presidency. The November 8, 2020 episode featured the first post-election story where the correspondent Bill Whitaker visited Pennsylvania during its vote-count process.
The election pieces continued, especially after the January 6 Capitol Riot, where the story then turned to its aftermath. The J6 stories continued for four more years, which culminated with “The Prosecution of January 6th” as the first story of the 2024/25 season, just two months before the 2024 election.
Even when compared to their past Trump coverage, the opening years of the second Trump term were dominated by harsher 60 Minutes stories, which comprised fears of cuts at USAID by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In a story titled “28 Days,” Pelley decried some of the actions of Trump’s first 28 days of his second term.
There were also fears for the Justice Department as, once again, Pelley proclaimed the next week in his “The Justice Department” story that “fear has silenced many in the department.”
Later in 2025, Pelley interviewed liberal election attorney Marc Elias over Trump lawsuits against law firms. The now-fired correspondent exclaimed, “Elias and others are warning that Trump’s assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself.”
60 Minutes also dived into the aftermath of the unrest in Minneapolis over ICE operations in the city, with a story by the now-fired Vega on January 18th, 2026: “By now, you have no doubt seen many of the scenes from Minneapolis. Immigration agents demanding proof of citizenship, even from some American citizens; protesters swarming as agents make arrests; the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer.”
The Border
Another large focus of their anti-Trump and anti-conservative framing was illegal immigration. In 2021, almost a year past the 2020 election, Shayrn Alfonsi had a story titled “1,000 Children” where she talked about first-term Trump border enforcement and family separation.
It continued into 2022 as Anderson Cooper reported a segment titled “Buses from the Border” that displayed the busing of illegal immigrants from the border by Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott to liberal areas of the country.
In 2023, Alfonsi once again harped on red state governors transporting illegal immigrants to blue states in her “The 50” story that implied the flight of around 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard from Florida was a criminal act: “Tonight, you will hear about the investigation into those flights and why one sheriff says it was more than just a cruel political stunt. He says it was a crime.”
A spring 2024 story by Cecilia Vega really went after Abbott again as, amid efforts by the State of Texas to enforce border laws during the Biden Administration’s border crisis, she asked, “Do you believe Texas has the right to secede? Is that what we are talking about here?”
CECOT Stories and Delay
The El Salvador CECOT mega-prison was also featured twice on the program, first by Vega in an April 2025 story titled “The Prisoners”: “Who did the U.S. government deport to El Salvador? 60 Minutes has been investigating the secretive operation that sent more than 200 men to a notorious Salvadoran prison, despite many not having criminal records.”
Then came Sharyn Alfonsi’s “Inside CECOT" story that was, now infamously, delayed by Weiss. The story echoed Vega’s earlier story, but detailed two of the men sent to prison who described “torture” at the high-security prison.
Liberal and Anti-Conservative
Another focus of the show was premier liberal policy points, such as police reform and abortion. In a November 2021 story titled "Reimagining Police," Pelley asked, "So, is it possible that ‘Defunding the police’ may help?”
It also targeted conservative politicians and groups. Along with their obsession with Abbott, 60 Minutes also went after Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in an infamous April 2021 hit piece by Alfonsi titled “A Fair Shot,” which implied DeSantis received money from Publix, the largest grocery store in Florida, to give the grocery store the ability to administer COVID vaccines.
In 2023, Moms for Liberty was another conservative group grilled by Pelley. He described parts of the interview and opined on the actions of the parental advocacy group amidst his loaded questioning:
They often dodged questions with talking points.
(...)
But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.
In another anti-Republican hit piece, longtime correspondent Lesley Stahl went after Ohio republican Congressman Jim Jordan in the spring of 2024 over his anti-censorship efforts in a story slyly titled “The Right to be Wrong.”
Stahl worried about a Supreme Court ruling, stating, “If the laws are upheld, platforms could be forced to carry hate speech and false medical information, the very content most big tech companies have spent years trying to remove through teams of content moderators. But in the process, conservatives claim that the companies have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress their speech.”
In more recent coverage on the magazine show, Vega, in her last aired story, framed congressional redistricting in Louisiana as racist and negatively portrayed Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry: “Louisiana’s Republican governor and his party are already moving to carve out new districts and many black voters we met fear their district will be wiped off the map.”
Political Puff Pieces
While the show gave tough interviews to Republican officials and candidates, the interviews with liberal politicians were mostly full of softballs.
In 2021, correspondent Jon Wertheim profiled Senator Angus King (I-ME), who is officially an independent but caucuses with Democrats and votes overwhelmingly with them. In the profile of King, Wertheim said, “Angus King is something akin to Atticus Finch on a Harley: A motorcycle-riding, duck-hunting, public-radio-listening straight-shooting independent, unencumbered by party politics, and that may be just what we need right now.”
Later in the same year, Stahl gave a glowing profile of former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney amid her participation in the January 6th Committee. In the introduction, Stahl gave a flattering description of Cheney as a hero: “Like a lone ranger riding out of the west, she’s one of the few Republicans willing to – daring to – stand up to Mr. Trump.”
In March of 2022, Anderson Cooper warmly described former Democrat presidential candidate and Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a “Rhodes scholar” who was now “dealing with the pandemic-related supply chain crisis and trying to ensure that hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are well spent on aging transportation systems in desperate need of repair.”
Later that year, O’Donnell, in an interview with then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen amid high inflation, stated, “There are few people who understand this complicated moment better than Janet Yellen.”
The Fired Correspondents
The firings of Pelley, Vega, and Alfonsi dominated the news cycle in June 2026, with many liberal networks decrying the firings. The most notable departure from 60 Minutes was Pelley, who had an infamous crash-out with new executive producer Nick Bilton and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, which ultimately led to his firing and the ensuing defense from the elitist media.
Over the course of the six seasons NewsBusters examined, Pelley, Vega, and Alfonsi were collectively responsible for 25 percent of liberal-leaning stories for 60 Minutes. This made Season 57’s spike all the more blatant when the trio of now-fired journalists pumped out a combined 15 liberal-tainted stories.
Put another way, those three were responsible for 75 percent of the liberal stories the show published during the 2024 presidential election cycle and the subsequent Trump transition.
Conclusion
As 60 Minutes is set for a possible new look, it is clear that the past years of the Sunday news program have showcased clear anti-conservative and anti-Trump biases. It is unclear how much that bias will change with new leadership, but it cannot be much worse than they have shown over the past six years.
METHODOLOGY: Media Research Center analyzed every 60 Minutes segment over the last six seasons, ranging from September 2020 to September 2026, identified every political-related report, and then evaluated each political story's ideological leaning, liberal or conservative, based on the content of the segment. Segments with unclear bias were not included in the study count, nor were interviews with presidents and presidential candidates, or vice presidents and vice presidential candidates.
NewsBusters Summer 2026 Interns Siena Do and James Waterman also contributed to research in this study.
