There have been months of controversy, outrage and general conversation regarding alterations to CBS’ 60 Minutes franchise under new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. But the venerable newsmagazine returned Sunday night to start its 59th season with a premiere that will probably offer very, very limited confirmation to both the pessimistic and optimistic biases espoused by pundits on the left and right.
I’m supposed to want to rend my garments over changes to 60 Minutes because I have an earnest belief that Weiss’ tenure at CBS News has rendered the nightly news broadcast and its overall coverage unwatchable; because every quote from new executive producer Nick Bilton has been glib and disheartening; and because circumstances surrounding the departure of respected on-air talent, particularly Scott Pelley, were handled with, at best, a lack of respect and little regard for professional optics.
The reality is that the 99.999 percent of 60 Minutes viewers who watched the show because they were too lazy to change the channel after CBS’ late NFL game ended, who watched out of tradition or casual curiosity or complacency, will not have noticed anything even vaguely notable or different in Sunday night’s premiere. Someone could write a thousand words pretending that aspects of Sunday’s 60 Minutes were earthshaking or infuriating or disgraceful, when the truth is that the premiere was mediocre but rarely in shocking or horrifying or new ways.
It was just a flat episode of television with some obvious problems. If I were going to write about those problems without awareness of the behind-the-scenes tumult, I’d probably lead by making fun of the third segment. That Jon Wertheim-fronted puff piece about Sean McVeigh and the Los Angeles Rams spent 15 minutes celebrating the NFL’s marquee franchise and presumptive Super Bowl favorites, just days after they were humiliated by the 49ers in a game that either was or wasn’t decided in part by McVeigh’s questionable choice to have the team travel Down Under slightly over a day ahead of taking the field (rather than allowing time to acclimate to the new time zone/hemisphere). It was a segment that aged instantly and poorly, and dodged ongoing controversies involving Rams star Puka Nacua entirely. But it was a puff piece of the type 60 Minutes has always sprinkled in around harder-hitting and more provocative pieces of reporting. By no stretch did it feel different.
Wertheim has been a part of the 60 Minutes rotation since 2017. The other key reports in the premiere were fronted by Lesley Stahl, with the show since 1991, and Norah O’Donnell, whose tenure began as a part-time correspondent back in 2015. Much was made of the new contributors and correspondents brought in by Weiss and Bilton, but other than New York Times veteran Ross Douthat — whose 60 seconds at the closing of the episode were dull and charisma-free, but not meaningfully — the premiere was designed to ease viewers through the transition in the least obtrusive way possible.
The series’ iconic ticking stopwatch was given a backdrop more white than red, but there have been minor cosmetic shifts periodically. You can’t make me pretend that this is better or worse than when the backdrop became red and the clock’s orientation was changed 20 years ago. The introduction of the correspondents was tweaked in minor ways, again not for better or worse. There were pre-season rumors about minor aesthetic changes to the way the show uses establishing shots and behind-the-scenes footage during reports, but based on one episode, those felt like they could just as easily have been a preference from an individual segment producer rather than a top-down fiat.
Look, there was much to be annoyed about when it came to the O’Donnell-centric opening segment, a piece of administration competence porn loosely masquerading as a military thriller. But I’m not journalistically attuned enough to put my finger, as a simple viewer, on how access to and participation by this White House in telling the story of a mission to rescue the two-man crew of a fighter jet shot down over Iran made this ethically different from countless similar 60 Minutes pieces over the years.
There has always been a gap between 60 Minutes reports that felt like they were in full accord with the official version of events and 60 Minutes reports that felt like they were pushing back against that official version; this was neither the first of the former kind, nor will it be the last. There was no depth and only limited insight, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was present because 60 Minutes clearly thought it would be cool to have him there and not because anything he said was the least bit revealing. Nothing in the reporting of the story amplified the inherent heroism of the rescue, nor was it dynamically propagandistic. It was just an unremarkable recounting of a remarkable event.
The Stahl-centric segment on pardon brokers was comparably bland. But nobody critical of the “Shot Down Over Iran” segment as being low-key propagandistic could deny that “The Pardon Economy” emphasized that, even if there have always been whiffs of pay-for-play or quid pro quo when it comes to the pardon process, the optics in the current administration are different and uglier.
So-called lobbyists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been described as con artists and fraudsters before, and that’s how they came across here. Ed Martin, former head of Trump’s pardon office at the DOJ, came across as halfway between disingenuous and clueless. Stahl asked follow-up questions, and the overall sense of injustice was palpable.
The only part of the segment that felt like actively bad journalism was Stahl’s assertion that “We have learned that the White House has become sensitive to the perception that the president is selling pardons” — a statement made without sourcing or an iota of corroborating evidence of what that “sensitivity” even entails. Should that one sloppy line of text be blamed on Weiss? I haven’t the faintest idea, and I’m not going to claim that that, or the comically pugnacious Trump statement closing the segment, necessarily have anything to do with the new 60 Minutes regime.
Ultimately, I am a regular 60 Minutes viewer, but not a religious 60 Minutes viewer, which is to say that I’ve always watched the segments that interested me and skipped the ones that didn’t, at the risk of appearing intellectually incurious. I did have a lot of respect for Pelley, and his absence will probably reduce the amount I tune in going forward. But if you ask me the question, “Did anything in the Season 59 premiere of 60 Minutes make it more or less likely that you’ll watch 60 Minutes going forward?” the answer, leaving all pre-season scuttlebutt out of it, is: “Yes, the Ross Douthat stuff made me less likely to watch, but otherwise? Nah.” This new 60 Minutes may get worse as the current leadership pushes it forward, or it may get better, but pretending this was a markedly different show for this one hour would be silly.
