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MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Cornered on ’60 Minutes’ Catastrophe

Bari Weiss has overseen the flagship show’s ratings slump—but she says she is not following the numbers closely.

The MAGA-coded editor of CBS News says she is not paying close attention to the lackluster ratings her reimagined flagship show is delivering this season.

Bari Weiss, the anti-woke opinion journalist installed as head of the newsroom a year ago, has overseen a new-look roster of 60 Minutes correspondents since the premiere of season 59 in September. Ratings, though, have been trending downward, with Sunday’s data showing 5.64 million viewers—the season’s smallest audience, six episodes in.

Weiss says her attention is largely elsewhere.

“I could never build anything if I were focused on the precise number of people that happen to tune in to the second feature on 60 Minutes on a given Sunday,” the 42-year-old has told The Information CEO and top editor Jessica Lessin at a tech summit.

Amid criticism of her leadership, Weiss says her strategy is to “put the blinders on, tune out the noise and focus.”

“I’m not doing anything I’m doing for popularity’s sake,” she said, according to The Guardian. She went on to claim that 60 Minutes as a whole is doing “tremendously well.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to CBS reps and Weiss for comment.

60 Minutes ratings depend in part on viewers who stay tuned after the network’s late-afternoon NFL game. This past Sunday, CBS didn’t have a game to help boost the numbers. The same was true on Oct. 10, when 6.06 million people tuned in, marking the show’s worst-rated fourth episode since 2000. The season’s most-watched episode aired the week after an NFL game, drawing 10.2 million total viewers.

When David Ellison, the 43-year-old son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison, installed Weiss as editor-in-chief, he knew she had no professional experience in television news. Since then, internal criticism of Weiss’ management has been frequent as she has overseen buyouts and layoffs, including the firings of 60 Minutes correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

Anderson Cooper, a 24-year veteran of the show, has also left, and Scott Pelley, who objected to the direction Weiss was taking the institution, was soon out, too.

Weiss also replaced executive producer Tanya Simon with Nick Bilton, a journalist and screenwriter with little traditional television experience.

At Wednesday’s summit, Weiss was asked if she wants to run CNN as well, given Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the network’s parent company.

“I want to focus on doing CBS News, trust me,” she said. “This is a big enough challenge.”

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