CBS Takes Major Nosedive After Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes Purge

CBS News is losing heads, both in the newsroom and across America.

Viewership plummeted at CBS News weeks after its chief, Bari Weiss, fired numerous producers and correspondents from 60 Minutes, according to Nielsen ratings data obtained by Status.

Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third-place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that recently changed: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, then dropped to 1.59 million on June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.

The dip was short-lived, but nonetheless “alarmed some officials,” since morning shows typically produce the lion’s share of ad revenue for the major news networks, according to Status reporter Oliver Darcy.

Change at 60 Minutes, the network’s famed investigative weekly program, has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on Trump deportations to the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

But Weiss may not be running the place for much longer. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to some longtime 60 Minutes staffers.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Steve Kroft, a 30-year veteran of the show, told Variety earlier this month. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

On the morning of Father’s Day, seven cars of ICE agents barreled through Santa Barbara, California, and detained anywhere from nine to 11 people, including one U.S. citizen.

The Santa Barbara Independent reported that three of the people detained were mariachi musicians, according to a spokesperson for an activist group that had been following the agents. The musicians may have been in the act of serenading fathers as part of a Mexican immigrant Father’s Day tradition, or on their way to do so.

As part of the action, ICE agents reportedly detained a U.S. citizen before releasing him at a nearby hospital. They also bear-sprayed a woman who was part of an ICE-monitoring organization through the rear window of her car.

Activists trailing ICE said that the agents didn’t just arrest people in the city but also sped down the streets in the early morning, and did donuts with their cars under the highway for 15 minutes. When they got on the freeway, the activists reported that the agents were going over 100 miles an hour.

Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara police chief, Kelly Gordon, had no idea ICE was in town. “We didn’t have any calls for service from 1 a.m. that were remotely close to what was being alleged on the Westside,” she said.

Planned Parenthood is on the path to having its funding restored thanks to Republican chaos in Congress.

The nonprofit health care organization could regain access to federal funds as soon as July 4, exactly one year after the Senate parliamentarian allowed Republicans to pass a one-year ban on national funding for the program, NOTUS reported Monday.

Amid all the chaos related to the Iran war, economic fallout, severed alliances over Trump’s midterm election endorsements, and a lapsed federal spy bill, Republicans have been unable to galvanize their party to vote to extend the limited ban.

“I think at this point, it’d be unlikely,” Montana Senator Steve Daines told NOTUS.

One possible pathway to advancing the anti-abortion agenda item would be to find a vehicle such as a third reconciliation bill to pass the ban, though Daines recognized that such bills are “hard to pass.”

Anti-abortion groups are pushing GOP lawmakers to find a way to pass a reconciliation bill regardless.

“Budget reconciliation remains the only viable legislative path to continuing to defund Big Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, wrote in a letter to Senate Republicans last week.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled that he intends to push for a third reconciliation bill in the near future, even as other top Republicans reject the idea. Senators Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins have already said they don’t see it happening.

“I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill,” McConnell, the chair of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said during a hearing earlier this month.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy also said he didn’t believe a third round of budgetary efforts would garner much support from the party, considering the difficulty the party faced during attempts to muster a second bill. “It’s not looking real good,” he told reporters.

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but that’s not the only service it offers. The nonprofit provides critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, and it does not use public funds to provide abortion care. Performing abortions with federal funds is already illegal based on the parameters set by the Hyde Amendment, which became law in 1976.

More states are pulling out of President Trump’s “Great American State Fair,” citing financial constraints.

Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have each declined to send a representative to the festival, which was meant to feature one 600-square-foot booth for each state, on the National Mall. The fair is set to begin Thursday, followed by 16 days of festivities. Notably, the six states that have dropped out all have Democratic governors.

“Given the significant costs associated with participating in the Great American State Fair, we chose to focus on supporting local efforts here in Washington state for this very important commemoration,” Washington Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck told The Hill. Fair organizer Freedom 250 has claimed that there are no cost requirements per state.

Luke Harkins, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s press secretary, pointed to “growing concerns that the event in Washington, D.C., is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy proclaimed that “everybody’s bailing on” Trump’s fair, though fellow blue states California, Colorado, and New York will be present.

This Freedom 250 festival has been a mess from the beginning, and it hasn’t even gotten started. From the first wave of announced performers dropping out to entire states now bailing, it’s becoming less and less clear what the event will look like. Nevertheless, Trump is insisting that the show must go on.

“On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “Starting at 7 P.M. EST, this HUGE Celebration will honor our Country’s People, Spirit, Strength, Resolve, and Triumphs. With the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and surrounding the beautifully new Reflecting Pool, more than 300 Members of our strong and talented Military Bands, Orchestras, and Ceremonial Units, will perform Patriotic Melodies and American Classics, and my Playlist.”

A federal judge has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from continuing to “haphazardly” create a database of millions of Americans it knew was “inaccurate” in order to purge noncitizens from voter rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Monday sided with the League of Women Voters, who’d challenged Trump’s directive to expand the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

In order to update the SAVE database, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services obtained Americans’ Social Security numbers from the Department of Government Efficiency—where some employees were accused of misusing Americans’ sensitive information—and combined it with citizenship data that “they knew to be unreliable,” Sooknanan wrote.

“Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” she wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Sooknanan ruled that the Trump administration had violated protections enshrined in the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Since SAVE was updated, numerous voters have been falsely declared noncitizens, threatened with removal from voter registration rolls, and in some cases, referred to the DHS for possible criminal investigations. Sooknanan found that these misidentifications qualified as, at the very least, “a lesser form” of defamation, and said the administration’s arguments to the contrary “border on absurd.”