From Watchdog to Lapdog?

The campaign to tame 60 Minutes and the broader war on independent journalism.

The campaign against 60 Minutes was never really about one interview or one lawsuit. It is about neutralizing one of the few remaining institutions capable of holding presidents accountable before a mass audience.

There has been, understandably, a lot of coverage of the death of 60 Minutes. As many people and outlets as possible should cover it: It represents the destruction of independent, honest news, and is a disturbingly significant step along our country’s road to autocracy.

60 Minutes is possibly the only U.S news program that has achieved highly successful commercial success and cultural impact. It is estimated to have generated billions of dollars for CBS; it commands premium rates for advertisers because of its large and engaged audience. And its recent season closed with over 9 million viewers per episode, making it America’s number one news show. It is TV’s longest continually running, prime time series: it created the newsmagazine format, relies on a confrontational interview style, and is widely considered the most honored television series in history.

This is my 60 Minutes story.

I have always been a fan. I watched the program for years. Through high school, college, and graduate school, I talked about it with coworkers and followed its correspondents as their careers continued and shifted into new areas.

And, in 2007, November to be exact, I was a guest on 60 Minutes.

The subject was the flawed information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and how the administration seemed to have used that to justify their invasion of Iraq. I had argued for months that that information was from an untrustworthy source; that it should not be used to justify anything. I lost that argument.

After the invasion, in 2003 and 2004, the story of the source who provided that “intelligence” was covered in print media, there were Congressional hearings; the Silberman-Robb Commission investigation of the pre-war assessments of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction published its final report on March 31, 2005. None of the public reporting had much impact. After 60 Minutes aired the program on Iraqi WMD, the power of this news program became clear to me: A respected and trusted media presence, telling an enormous number of people across America the once secret story that explained why we went to war, brought weight, credibility, and reach.

During all this time, while living in New York being a businessperson, Donald Trump was loving press coverage. He liked it so much that he would call offices of the print media, using a fake name and pretending to be a press rep for himself. He did this to pass along tidbits about his wealth, his ranking on Forbes 400, and generally manipulate the press coverage he got.

Once he became president in 2017, however, Trump discovered that real press coverage about real events could be problematic. The press focused on Trump’s decisions to separate immigrant children from their parents, cage people at the border, place extortive phone calls to foreign leaders, and file frivolous lawsuits which were often followed by fraudulent, illegal “settlements.” None of this was a good look.

18 days into his second term, Donald Trump initiated his counteroffensive with the announcement that 60 Minutes must be “immediately terminated,” and stripped of its broadcast license. This was shortly after he sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Trump alleged that the network had doctored that interview in a way that could change the election results.

CBS responded to the lawsuit, noting that the 60 Minutes broadcast “was not doctored or deceitful.” CBS also pointed out that if the edited portions were election fraud and had changed the results, Trump would not have been inaugurated. Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez declared, “The transcript and footage of this interview provide no evidence that CBS and its affiliated broadcast stations violated FCC rules.” She further called the lawsuit a “fishing expedition.”

Luckily for the undaunted Trump, his ally and Oracle founder Larry Ellison created a media corporation which included CBS (and which looks quite like a monopoly in the making). Under the Ellison umbrella, CBS, that once-formidable, now neutralized company, is run by Bari Weiss, a prominent opinion writer and commentator who has little or no experience in broadcast news. The New York Times wrote of Weiss, “Ultimately, while she holds several socially liberal personal beliefs, her opposition to progressive orthodoxy has made her a prominent voice often aligned with conservative and center-right thinking.” It seems that Weiss may not understand that what is in place today, the Times continued, is an “authoritarian presidency that threatens to crush the very values of free speech and open discourse that Weiss pledged to uphold. Instead of continuing its campaign against bullies, The Free Press these days seems to be contorting itself to defend the bullies of the moment as misunderstood people who sometimes act out, but just because they, too, have been mistreated.”

Unsurprisingly, CBS personnel reacted negatively to the hiring of leaders with little to no broadcast experience. In one of many instances, longtime newsman and 22-year host of 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley of CBS, noted that Ms. Weiss has done her best to destroy, or, in his words, “murder,” 60 Minutes. Pelley has now been fired.

As the Ellisons and Bari Weiss continue to restructure CBS in Trump’s image, it seems likely that there will be little accurate or intrusive reporting on Trump, his family, his corruption, his grift or his dishonesty. It seems unlikely, given her actions to date at CBS, that she will challenge the Trump establishment, and, rather, will continue to rail against “old line journalism.”

The CBS that protected and promoted Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather will now be the CBS that protects Donald Trump.

60 Minutes used to be a place that challenged the words of government and the powerful. It seems unlikely that the Ellison/Weiss duo will continue that tradition and more likely that they will make 60 Minutes a press outlet for the powerful to distort reality and expand their power; just what every autocratic wannabe needs and wants.

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep whistling past the graveyard.

Margaret Henoch served in the Clandestine Service of the CIA for 25 years, at Headquarters and in the field, focusing on operations and counterintelligence and retiring as a Senior Intelligence Officer. She is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.