After weeks of speculation, CBS News under Bari Weiss has made some big changes to the team at 60 Minutes -- firing the executive producer Tanya Simon, as well as correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor of the show, was also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.
They announced a new executive producer -- Nick Bilton, a former New York Times technology columnist who has made documentaries for HBO and Netflix. The New York Times typically dissed their former co-workers for being inexperienced: “Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with no prior experience in television,” has hired “Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in traditional broadcast news.” But he’s been making documentaries, which is pretty much what 60 Minutes aims to do.
Liberal media outlets fret about the "traditions" at CBS, which means the "long-standing leftist bias." No one should ever attempt to move anything two ticks to the center. The Times account added:
Mr. Bilton, 49, will start his position with a staff already anxious about how the long-held traditions of “60 Minutes” might change. In a joint interview with Ms. Weiss on Thursday, he said that his experience in documentary film and TV was in keeping with the founding ethos of the program, which he called “the most important news brand in American life.”
...Mr. Bilton said that the recent furor around “60 Minutes” was “just noise,” chalking it up to routine fallout spurred by disruption at a legacy business. He added that the “end result” of the change would be “quite frankly phenomenal.”
Bilton doesn’t have any right-wing credentials. He became a technology columnist for the Times in 2009, and left in 2016 to join Vanity Fair as a correspondent. None of that screams “Republican takeover.” He's already talking up a more aggressive daily role for 60 Minutes online as in an interview with the Semafor media newsletter:
Bilton told Semafor the program is an “incredible institution that is largely underutilized,” saying he planned to expand the franchise beyond its one-hour timeslot on Sundays. He envisions a more always-on operation that will publish more investigations and correspondent-driven content online.
“It’s the same as The New York Times publishing in print once a day, or Vanity Fair being a magazine that only goes out once a week or The New Yorker, or whatever. If you look historically to what happens to these institutions, why they fail — it’s because they don’t innovate and they don’t disrupt themselves,” he said. “I think that’s where we are with broadcast television. To me, that’s the most incredible exciting opportunity — to expand it beyond just one hour a week.”
Will anything dramatically change in its tilt? When Bari Weiss revamped the CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, it hasn't turned into "CBS Newsmax," as the leftists always project. It often seems that the rebels inside CBS News are always trying to keep just as much ideological energy as they can, and implying Weiss is going to wreck everything is their way to keep her in check.
