Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,
On the heels of a controversial 58th season that saw the firing of multiple respected correspondents and the (alleged) pulling of stories to appease the Trump administration, 60 Minutes returned for its 59th season on Sunday to little fanfare. Despite the breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of the new Bari Weiss-led CBS regime (including a piece by yours truly), the first episode of America’s most-watched news program under her and executive producer Nick Bilton was quiet, clunky, and quite unremarkable.
It would be much easier, and frankly more fun, to critically take down some obvious right-wing gibberish and watch the sweet, sweet Substack likes roll in. Unfortunately, things are more complicated than most expected. The new 60 Minutesisn’t really a terrifying propaganda machine flashing neon signs to appease Trump. Instead, it operates like most corporate “refreshes” these days: rushed, dumbed-down, and mostly the same as the original, yet still noticeably worse.
That is not to say the ideological drift of CBS News isn’t obvious here. It just takes the form of cowardly access journalism. Norah O’Donnell opened the premiere with a story on the “daring” rescue the US Air Force pulled off last April when two pilots crashed in Iranian territory. It is framed, unmistakably, as a massive win for the Trump administration. The only whiff of negativity in the entire report is a brief mention at the top of the “costly and unpopular” war in Iran. Footage from the rescue, given to CBS News exclusively, is the only context we are given. One is forced to wonder if the station would’ve received such footage if they had been more critical.
Rather than ask why we’re at war with Iran at all, or suggest that the rescue’s success pales next to the war’s broader failure, O’Donnell simply asks Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “what was going through his mind” when he learned two pilots had been shot down. Hegseth is characteristically glib and— at least compared to the actual military officials interviewed — visibly unaware of the mission’s logistics. It’s unclear why he is in the report at all, since he offers no insight beyond his own internal psyche. Perhaps he and Weiss are just good friends, and he stopped by for a quick chat.
While interviewing one of the rescued pilots—his first time speaking about the ordeal, another exclusive for the crack team at CBS—O’Donnell refers to him only as “Bravo.” She claims this is to protect him from Iran, a country he’s no longer in, though they show his face anyway. Performative secrecy aside, the pilot repeatedly frames his rescue in religious terms, calling it “a testament to God’s provision in my life.” I don’t doubt his sincerity, but it is hard to see the purpose of this lengthy interview as anything but a PR campaign to save face on a disastrous war. Thousands of Iranians, including an entire school of children, have been killed over vague nuclear compounds that may or may not still exist. CBS didn’t see fit to mention that, or much of anything beyond the unchallenged opinions of military personnel. This isn’t totally beyond the pale for the program—60 Minutes was never exactly radical to begin with—but knowing Weiss and Bilton’s mandate makes the optics worse, even if the substance is largely inert.
Next came Lesley Stahl’s segment on the Trump Pardon Economy, ostensibly the night’s hardest-hitting piece. Using hidden cameras, Stahl sends a fake client to meet with “pardon brokers” who promise they can secure him a pardon for $300,000. But beyond being journalistically lazy, the hidden cameras make for startlingly bad TV. The meeting is a mundane conversation in which two known MAGA operatives, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, essentially promise they can use their connections to annoy Trump into signing a piece of paper.
60 Minutes has always relied on being professional, to-the-point, and entertaining. This segment is the opposite: sloppy, drawn out, and boring. Any viewer with a pulse already knows the Trump administration is selling pardons; it’s been widely reported for over a year. Even his most ardent supporters know about his penchant for corruption—for many, it’s a feature, not a bug. And in case you thought Stahl’s story was purely critical, it ends with her noting that the administration is “aware of the perception” that the pardon system is corrupt (no sources given), before she reads a boilerplate denial from the White House and cuts to commercial.
At a certain point, you have to ask whether the freakout over Weiss’s influence was overblown—not because her ideological project isn’t real, but because her team is just so phenomenally incompetent. When news broke that Bilton would be taking over the program, it seemed odd. This is a man with virtually no relevant broadcast news experience, whose most notable recent TV credit was writing for HBO’s The Idol—widely considered the worst show the network has ever made. Bilton clearly has a thing or two to learn about pacing and production, as Sunday’s segments, beyond their poor reporting, were simply too long.
His decision to hire former New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat (which is hilarious) shows a total disregard for the aesthetic realities of the medium. You can’t just drop print columnists onto a broadcast set. Douthat has a face for radio and barely a voice for anything at all. His segment, one of the show’s “Last Minute” spots, consisted of him awkwardly introducing himself, stating that AI is an important and potentially dangerous technology, and signing off. It was bizarre.
Maybe the timidity of the 60 Minutes refresh is more revealing than any right-wing spectacle Weiss could have cooked up. A year ago, she was seen as a powerful force in media, destined—or cursed—to usher in a new era of American news. Hired to solve a fake problem (CBS was never all that biased) and appease a petulant baby (the President), Weiss’s grand ideological project seems to have sputtered out into mind-numbing mediocrity.
The “silent majority” supposedly waiting for the culture war to invade newsroom hiring practices, it turns out, isn’t real. What’s left isn’t a terrifying right-wing news program so much as a TV program that can’t quite manage to be a anything at all—propaganda too incompetent to persuade anyone of anything, beyond their need to turn of the TV and go to sleep. As with many things these days, the 60 Minutes reboot simply proves that ideological commitments cannot conquer plain stupidity, that corporate America, rather than being true believers in the Trump project, is simply looking for palatable dreck to distract the masses, and that the joke is on all of us for even caring at all. Oh well.
Signing off,
Max Bolen
Probably the youngest person alive still watching 60 Minutes.
If you want to kill legacy media, let Bari Weiss write the instruction manual. She appears to be a thought leader in that arena. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Morley Safer. I know what real reporting looks like. I'll look for it elsewhere.
If you’d told me I’d say this 30 years ago, I would have lunged for the tranquilizer gun and net, but “Don’t you just miss Andy Rooney? I know I do.”