Jon Stewart really wants Bari Weiss to leave 60 Minutes alone.
“60 Minutes is a great show. I hope she doesn’t f--- up 60 Minutes,” Stewart, 63, said on his Weekly Show podcast Wednesday. “They do a really nice job on 60 Minutes at times. They do some great stories.”
The host went on to explain why he believes that the uproar over the MAGA-friendly new head of CBS News may be getting too much attention. “Network news is a relic,” he explained, “like, I just don’t think it’s even a relevant addition to the information biome.”
That said, Weiss does have plans to overhaul 60 Minutes, according to an Axios report from December. Her latest move, per a New York Post report from last week, is to potentially get rid of longtime correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley, following their pushback to Weiss’ initial decision to pull the show’s “Inside CECOT” segment about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvadoran megaprison. The site reported that the network is willing to buy out their contracts.
Stewart said that, aside from a few programs on the network like 60 Minutes or CBS Mornings, which he said “are still viable cultural forces and can be,” it may not be worth the fight to keep Weiss and others from MAGA-fying network television.
“The difficulty with all this, everybody’s like, ‘Barry Weiss is gonna ruin CBS News!’ I don’t know about you, but like… did you watch CBS News?” prior to Weiss’s installation as network head by Skydance-Paramount CEO David Ellison. “I didn’t,” Stewart admitted.
Stewart also argued that Weiss’ struggle to make the network relevant is emblematic of the whole industry’s problem: “The idea that making something fair means making sure that MAGA has a voice—that, to me, is just the mistake of not understanding what the problem with news is.”
“The problem with news isn’t ‘there’s not enough Republican or conservative voices.’ The problem is, it’s not focused just on corruption. It’s focused on the binary of left and right. Like, who gives a f---? Do corruption versus integrity.”
As for Fox News and its willingness to lightly buck the Trump administration’s narrative about the killing of VA nurse Alex Pretti, 37, Stewart said he’s not impressed with the otherwise pro-Trump network.
“I still feel like they view it as a PR war and not as a function of government overreach or authoritarianism or overly militarized,” Stewart said.
“I think it’s like, f---, that video’s just so clear,” he continued. “Even the high priests of no principled, we’re just gonna buckle down and get our talking points out there, even they go like, ‘I can’t polish this turd.’...They’ve just been handed an assignment that they can’t complete. And they’ll go right back to completing the assignment as soon as the smoke clears.”
