“They’re Gutting Us”: Staff Say Bari Weiss Is Destroying 60 Minutes

CBS News chief Bari Weiss has hacked up 60 Minutes to the point that even show staffers have lost faith in the famed magazine show.

Weiss’s recent shakeup at 60 Minutes has involved the exit of several of the show’s major personalities, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Correspondent Anderson Cooper left voluntarily.

To replace the top leadership, Weiss has installed former Vanity Fair writer Nick Bilton who, like her, has next to no formal experience in broadcast journalism.

But 60 Minutes staffers don’t see Weiss’s aggressive restructuring as an optimistic new era for the program—instead, there’s a near-unanimous prediction that “it’s over.”

Status reported on the maelstrom behind the scenes, citing “more than half a dozen” staffers.

“They’re gutting us,” one 60 Minutes employee told Status. “It’s over. I don’t see how ‘60’ will be able to function after this.”

“Goodnight and good luck, motherfuckers,” they added.

Another senior staffer told Status that “everyone—100 percent thought Tanya and Draggan did exemplary jobs.”

“It hurts. We feel violated,” the senior staffer said.

Weiss’s tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

In a statement shared with The New York Times, Vega said she “very much [fears] what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.”

“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” Vega wrote. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.”

“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy,” the George Polk Award-winning journalist noted.

But CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was ready and willing to sacrifice 60 Minutes long before that. The media conglomerate undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Donald Trump over the show’s 2024 Kamala Harris interview, in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance.

That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling Trump’s groundless lawsuit.

Owens, who has largely remained out of the spotlight since leaving the show, shared his opinion on Weiss’s recent restructuring with Status. “They’re killing 60 Minutes,” he said.

President Trump can’t help gloating about his lone presidential debate with Joe Biden in June 2024 following former first lady Jill Biden’s revelations from that night in her upcoming memoir.

“Jill Biden is now out there finally admitting that she did NOT know what went wrong with Sleepy Joe during our spectacular, and highly rated, 2024 Presidential Debate, where Joe was not exactly performing to the highest level of debate standards,” Trump crowed on Truth Social Friday morning. “She said that she thought he was having a ‘stroke,’ and various other really bad things, and yet never rushed onto the stage to help her troubled husband, as any good wife would do.”

Trump went on to brag about his own performance during the debate, and say that the former first lady didn’t mention how well he was doing and whether his performance caused President Biden to “choke.”

In early reports about Jill Biden’s memoir, which is being released this week, it’s revealed that even she was concerned about that fateful evening when President Biden struggled to speak clearly and appear coherent in the face of attacks from Trump.

“Is he short-circuiting?” Jill Biden wrote according to a review by The Atlantic. “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?” She questioned whether he took too much cough syrup or Ambien.

President Biden said that he was recovering from illness that evening, and while helping him prepare for the debate in the preceding weeks, his staff had built naps into his schedule to help him rest following two trips to Europe. It was all for nought, as he still looked and sounded unwell on the Las Vegas debate stage.

Ultimately, fallout from the poor debate performance led to Biden dropping out of the race one month later, and Vice President Kamala Harris was named the Democratic nominee. However, she would end up losing the presidential election in November, raising all kinds of questions as to whether Biden should have dropped out sooner, or made the decision not to run early enough to hold a Democratic primary.

Regardless, that was two years ago, but Trump can’t help reliving one of his greatest moments in the only election where he won the popular vote, because right now, his approval ratings are lower than they have ever been, and his presidency is floundering.

A federal judge on Friday temporarily suspended the Trump administration’s plans for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—an attempt to pay President Trump’s friends, allies, supporters, and anyone else who felt wronged by the previous administration.

The order, sent down by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, states that the president is not allowed to pursue “the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”

The Department of Justice fund has been met with protest from both Democrats and Republicans alike for its deep conflicts of interest—given that this all came about after Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion, then settled for this fund for people who acted in his name.

This ruling came after former January 6 prosecutor Andrew Floyd and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Trump administration on the grounds that the settlement was “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption,” which was “designed to funnel $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund to purported victims of what the President considers ‘lawfare’ and government ‘weaponization.’”

The issue will be adjudicated on June 12, when Brinkema will decide whether to issue a more lasting suspension.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump is preparing to offer Iran a $300 billion bribe to back out of a war he never should have waded into—and it’s all thanks to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The United States is considering creating a massive investment fund for Iran as part of a peace deal, after Tehran demanded reparations for the destruction, The New York Times reported Thursday. An Iranian official put the amount for the “reconstruction program” at $300 billion.

The fund seemed to be spurred by an idea from Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, both of whom are real estate investors. Some mediators said that the duo had pitched promoting real estate projects and an investment fund for Tehran in the event that a deal was reached.

It seems pretty clear that this investment fund is a thinly veiled strategy for them to make money from the destruction Trump leaves in his wake. Kushner is currently being investigated for cashing in on foreign investment funds.

This move also reeks of irony, considering the right-wing criticism of former President Barack Obama’s previous nuclear deal with Iran that unfroze a now meager-looking $1.7 billion. Now Trump wants to write Tehran a bigger check.

A Kenyan court on Friday suspended President Trump’s plan to build a quarantine field hospital in the region to house Americans exposed to the Ebola virus in the country—rather than have them return home for treatment.

The denial came after a lawsuit filed by the Katiba Institute, a Kenyan constitutional rights organization. It alleged that the “secretive, unilateral establishment of an Ebola quarantine facility raises grave constitutional concerns regarding the rights to life, health, fair administrative action, public participation, and parliamentary oversight.”

The facility, built on the U.S. Laikipia Air Base in Kenya, would have housed up to 50 U.S. citizens while they waited for treatment. It was meant to house U.S. citizens exposed to Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Uganda.

“At its core, this case is about preserving constitutional accountability, protecting public health, and ensuring that no government may place expediency above the lives and safety of the people of Kenya,” Katiba Institute executive director Nora Mbagathi wrote Thursday on X.

The Kenyan government, which has not publicly commented on the plan, has 48 hours to respond to the court’s interim decision.

The Ebola virus is already reported to have passed 1,000 positive cases and around 250 deaths. Trump attempting to dump American citizens who got the virus in Kenya—even as both countries struggle to protect their own citizens and resources—is a paternalistic move that puts even more Kenyans in danger.