Bari Weiss was supposed to 'restore trust' in CBS News. It's eroding, says CNN's Brian Stelter.

• Bari Weiss was a controversial figure before she took over CBS News last year.
• Now she’s become a very well known figure — especially after remaking “60 Minutes” by firing many of its top employees.
• CNN’s Brian Stelter is sympathetic to Weiss’ impulse to remake CBS News. But he thinks she’s going about it the wrong way.

In both cases, I think a fair-minded observer could say, “That sounds bad, but also I’m not 100% sure that what he says is political bias is necessarily political bias.”

In Pelley’s case, they did a story about federal agents killing Renée Good, and his interpretation is that Bari Weiss wanted that piece balanced in a way that benefited the Trump administration.

But I can imagine some nuance: “Look, are we covering all the angles? Are we dotting all the i’s? And what we say in an email is not what we put out as a report.”

You’re hitting on this tug-of-war between one side saying it’s political interference and the other side saying, “No, this is just how newsrooms work. We’re just having editorial discussions. And there should be a push and pull.” I understand why it was concerning to him. But I don’t know if it adds up to a real thumb on the scale the way he says.

[I’ve asked Weiss for comment. A CBS News rep says Weiss’ proposed changes “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”]

There’s now this idea that the “60 Minutes” controversy might be too much for Ellison to bear — either because it’s embarrassing, or maybe it’s a problem with regulators. But he’s presumably going to own Paramount for decades, and if he wants to, he can have a very long view and not worry about what people like you and I are saying in the spring of 2026. Do you think there’s any reason he says, “Actually, the Bari Weiss experiment is a failure or needs to be changed in some meaningful way?”

I don’t know. I urge everybody to go back and reread his memo from October when he hired Bari Weiss and bought The Free Press.

He talked about how polarized the country is, how destabilized our politics feel, how the extremes are winning out, and how companies like Paramount have a responsibility to help people know what is real in the world.

He said a lot of really powerful things in that memo about restoring trust. Has Weiss restored trust in media? That’s the fair question to ask nine months later.

In Pelley’s interview, he notes that “60 Minutes” is still doing well. But Paramount is saying that “60 Minutes” needs to be blown up — that it’s a melting ice cube, in Nick Bilton’s language, and it needs to move to the future.

A successful broadcast television show that attracts millions of viewers is not nothing. Do you think it should be blown up? Or eased into something else?

I find it to be a very persuasive, compelling argument that “60 Minutes” — and I acknowledge this is mostly the Weiss camp saying this on background — that “60 Minutes” is really powerful, but it’s out of date. It’s archaic. It’s too insular.

Weiss is clearly determined to make her mark at “60 Minutes” and not allow the historic insularity of “60 Minutes” to continue.

There are some really strong arguments for why you should evolve now — from a position of strength while the show is still highly rated — rather than wait for the ratings to erode. The line that Bilton and Weiss used internally was, “If you don’t disrupt yourself, you will get disrupted.”

I think the history of media shows that is true. But it always comes down to, not whether to do it, but how you do it. How do you execute on the plan? Isn’t this the story we cover over and over again? People doing the right things, maybe in the wrong ways.

But doesn’t this look like what David Ellison wanted when he brought in Bari Weiss — who has zero television experience and is an ideologue — and said, “I want you to run this news organization, including ’60 Minutes,’ and I want you to blow it up?”

There’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying. I have perceived from people close to Weiss that she looked around CBS News and was shocked by just how obsolete some of the operations were back when she arrived.

She looked around, and she said, “This place has been losing, so I’m not gonna be tethered to what you were doing for 10 or 20 years. It wasn’t working.”

And she had a lot of latitude, and does today, thanks to Ellison. But Ellison also said in his announcement the day that she was hired that “We’re going to make CBS News the most trusted name in news.”

We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.” The issue now is a lot of these actions, a lot of these controversies, they have eroded trust. They have not built trust back.

[Ellison, in a Sunday telephone call to “60” correspondent Lesley Stahl, said he would respect the editorial independence of the program, Stahl told the Times on Tuesday.]

You’re at CNN, reporting on the company that is likely to own CNN later this year. What’s the vibe in the room?

Yeah. I’m covering the Paramount saga from inside the company that Paramount is trying to acquire.

I am very happy to say I have full autonomy to do so. No one is influencing my reporting. No one’s reviewing what I’m saying on TV. I’m really blessed to have that autonomy.

So let’s play this merger out for a moment. Let’s say that Paramount does win all the necessary approvals, and CNN and CBS are owned by the same company. There are a lot of great opportunities. I see a lot of potential. It makes a lot of sense, as both a viewer as well as an employee of CNN.

But nobody knows how it’s going to work. A lot of the news coverage this week has revolved around what that might look like. There were reports Tuesday morning about Paramount trying to bring in a business-side partner for Bari Weiss.

I think there are some reasons to be skeptical of those stories. But it just shows the amount of uncertainty that exists right now about what that post-merger landscape looks like.