Bari Weiss took over 60 Minutes without a day of broadcast experience to her name, and through five episodes, the ratings have been brutally honest about what that looks like.
The fifth episode of the season drew 9.6 million viewers, down 14% from the 11.1 million who watched the same episode last year, according to The Daily Beast’s ratings report. The season premiere performed even worse, attracting just 7.7 million viewers, a 19% drop from the previous year’s opener. Among adults aged 25 to 54, the decline was even steeper, with viewership falling 33% in the demographic advertisers value most. The show averaged 8.6 million viewers last season, a figure Weiss has yet to match this season.
Status, the media newsletter tracking the numbers, offered a grim assessment. “It’s another bad sign for Bari Weiss, who radically overhauled the show with the promise of improving its performance,” the outlet wrote. “Instead, so far this season, she’s lucky to match the previous year’s ratings.” It reached for an analogy: “It’s like taking apart a perfectly functioning Ferrari to make it even faster, only to put it back together and discover it’s actually slower than before.”
Weiss joined CBS News after Paramount CEO David Ellison paid $150 million to acquire The Free Press, the right-leaning outlet she co-founded. She had never run a broadcast newsroom, and the transition has not been smooth. Staffers have openly challenged her leadership, while questions have emerged over how The Free Press, which is nonunion, fits into a CBS News workforce largely represented by the Writers Guild of America.
The most explosive confrontation involved Lesley Stahl, who has been at 60 Minutes for 35 years. Stahl pushed back hard after Weiss and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, arrived with a stack of editorial notes on a segment about violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Weiss has been a vocal supporter of Israel and a persistent critic of how the media has covered the war in Gaza. Forelle tried to kill the piece entirely. It aired anyway, but only after what sources described as an all-out battle.
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“They didn’t know if it was going to air because the screenings got so heated,” one source told Status. People close to Stahl said she privately considered leaving the show altogether, and those familiar with her thinking do not expect her to return.
Meanwhile, Weiss has been reshaping the show to reflect her own vision. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat joined as a new correspondent, while she arranged an interview between anchor Tony Dokoupil and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She also organized a panel moderated by Norah O’Donnell featuring Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Neither assignment went to the show’s existing anchors, Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson.
Inside Paramount, the show’s future appears to hinge on a single ratings target. “It’s 10.03M or bust,” a veteran television news executive told Status. “If they fall short, they’re cooked.”
Featured image via X screengrab
