It only took $16 million, new ownership and deep staff cuts for CBS News to lure President Donald Trump back to “60 Minutes.” A year after he filed a frivolous lawsuit against CBS News and its parent company, Paramount, over the editing of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election, Trump sat down with the network’s Norah O’Donnell for his own edited interview — and he was sure to take his victory lap.
“You don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you,” Trump joked after reminding O’Donnell that “actually ‘60 Minutes’ paid me a lotta money.” Coincidentally — or not — “60 Minutes” did not air that portion of Trump’s interview.
The president’s interview, which aired on Sunday night, comes at a moment when CBS News’ credibility is under strain. After initially calling Trump’s suit “meritless” and an “affront to the First Amendment,” Paramount Global’s then-controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, decided to pay $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library to end the litigation.
Trump had claimed Harris’ interview was selectively edited and constituted “election interference,” which caused him to suffer “mental anguish,” his attorneys claimed. (As part of the settlement, CBS News agreed to release full transcripts of future “60 Minutes” presidential interviews.) On Sunday, “60 Minutes” aired only 27 minutes of Trump’s 73-minute interview.
The blatant double standard was apparently too much for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to stomach. “Maybe I should file a complaint with the FCC against the Trump White House for editing his unhinged 60 Minutes interview,” he posted on X after the interview aired. “It will use the exact same language Trump lodged against Vice President Harris.”
The threat of future action from Democrats is unlikely to spook the network, which recently agreed to only air unedited interviews on its Sunday morning news program “Face the Nation,” following criticism from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s team over an interview.
This comes after an $8 billion merger of Paramount Global with Skydance Media, which is owned by David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire — and prominent Trump supporter — Larry Ellison.
When it sought approval from the Federal Communications Commission for the merger, Skydance committed to hiring an ombudsman to oversee viewer complaints, and promptly hired Kenneth R. Weinstein, who once led a conservative think tank. The company then paid $150 million to hire Bari Weiss to helm CBS News. As co-founder of the Free Press, a prominent reactionary newsletter, she routinely published strident pro-Israel coverage — some of which criticized CBS News for its coverage of the Israeli-Gaza conflict — and anti-transgender articles and essays.
Trump, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Weiss. “I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great,” the president told O’Donnell in another portion that was left out of the televised edition.
Trump, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Weiss. “I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great,” the president told O’Donnell in another portion that was left out of the televised edition.
While O’Donnell tried to press Trump on several points, he was ultimately able to either deflect with attacks against his political opponents or outright lies. When asked about his controversial recent pardon of Changpeng Zhao, whose company helped the Trump family make $550 million, the president incredulously claimed he did not know the man.
Weiss is apparently instituting new strategic mandates. On Monday, veteran anchor and correspondent John Dickerson, who has served as co-anchor of “CBS Evening News” since January, announced he will leave the network by the end of the year, making him the first major on-air talent to resign since Ellison and Weiss took charge. Days later, the media company announced wide-ranging staff cuts, including laying off CBS Saturday Morning co-anchors Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson, closing down the Johannesburg bureau and dismantling the race and culture team.
Trey Sherman, a producer on “CBS Evening News Plus,” said in a TikTok that “every producer on my team who got laid off is a person of color,” a sentiment echoed by other sacked staffers on social media. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, whom the New York Post identified as “pro-Israel,” reportedly appealed directly to Weiss, complaining of his mistreatment in Rome and asking to be reassigned to Israel. According to the Independent, Weiss relented and instead terminated Debora Patta, a 12-year veteran reporter who was recently targeted by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for her editing of a sitdown interview the two had. She is reportedly considering filing a lawsuit for her firing. Anchor Gayle King, whose job is rumored to be on the chopping block, forcefully pushed back on Friday: “What I’m not gonna do is negotiate in the media. Not doing that!”
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Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer whose rise to power has been a result of her crusade against the so-called “wokes,” reportedly wants to boot longtime “60 Minutes” correspondents like Scott Pelley and Bill Whitaker, and is looking to poach conservative voices like CNN’s Scott Jennings and Fox News’ Bret Baier and Dana Perino from their respectives perches.
“This pattern aligns with Weiss’s broader agenda: rebranding mainstream institutions as ‘anti-woke’ at the expense of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Vanuska Sylvester of the Breaking Bias Channel, a platform that chronicles discrimination in professional settings.
Sylvester explained to Salon that Weiss’ “influence at CBS is part of a larger media shift that seeks to silence progressive and Black perspectives while courting conservative approval.”
Since Weiss took over, CBS has featured Trump figures Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff for an interview on “60 Minutes” about the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza and a discussion with former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice about the apparent end of the war once a deal was brokered. Interestingly, as the New York Times reported, “In the two weeks that she has worked at the network, Ms. Weiss has not promoted any articles or reporting from CBS News on her X account, which reaches 1.1 million followers…As a Middle East peace deal came into view, Ms. Weiss shared numerous pro-Israel opinion pieces from The Free Press, and an editorial that said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, had failed ‘the Hamas test.’”
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So far, Weiss is not yet fully convincing the conservative audience she is apparently targeting. “I remember when ‘60 Minutes’ was a news entity before they became a debating society,” complained actor and MAGA mouthpiece James Woods on X. “Literally in the first five minutes of this interview with the President of the United States, [O’Donnell] interrupted him repeatedly every single time he started to answer. I turned it off.”
Trust in the news media is at an all-time low. But CBS News, according to recent polling, is actually one of the most trusted news outfits. Weiss has claimed she wants to hold “both American political parties to equal scrutiny” — but she seems to have fallen for Trump’s narrative about the media.
Over the course of 10 years, the president has written nearly 3,500 social media posts that attack the press. Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, who interviewed Trump in 2020 during his last appearance on “60 Minutes,” revealed that after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he admitted to her why he attacks the media. “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”It’s been a decades-long project for Donald Trump. As Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in April, recently said of his former employer, “The only thing I could do was professionally blow myself up to create a blast radius around ‘60 Minutes’ to get people’s attention that this was happening.”
