'60 Minutes' in crisis: 3 takeaways

During an emotionally-charged editorial meeting at "60 Minutes" on Monday, senior correspondent Scott Pelley told the show's new executive producer that Bari Weiss, CBS News' editor-in-chief, was "murdering" the iconic broadcast.

What's going on over at West 57th Street headquarters? Here are three takeaways:

'Murdering?' Really?  

The flashpoint here — or at least the latest one — was last Thursday when Weiss fired four top off-screen executives and two on-air correspondents, then named Nick Bilton, a broadcast news neophyte, the program's new executive producer. None of the executives are household names, but the two correspondents — Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega — are certainly well-known to viewers. That's a total of six top people fired without cause, so Pelley's inflammatory language makes perfect sense. But this hardly seems like a cold-blooded murder. Depraved? Sure. Cruel? Absolutely. But murder? It's helpful to contextualize here that the people now running CBS prefer to kill major franchises outright, like "The Late Show." They could have simply stated that "60 Minutes" is "losing money" (it isn't) and that "it's time to go in a different direction," then air repeats of "Tracker" Sundays at 7 p.m. (This still may come to pass.) Now, that's murder. But right now, this is garden-variety mismanagement and incompetence.

CBS News hopes no one is paying attention

The firings took place after the end of the season, when "60" goes into the summer lull. Weiss and her minions appear to have made the calculation that no one is paying attention. That's probably true. The average "60 Minutes" viewer — and there are 9 million of them — has no idea what just happened, probably wouldn't care either. Inside baseball to them. (Sure, the media is obsessed but who pays attention to us either?) Weiss also may be thinking Bilton has three months to get the fire under control. Maybe, but this is a four-alarm blaze. Indeed, the other particularly cold-blooded calculation appears to be that if you amputate the so-called "Deep State" at "60 Minutes" you neuter opposition. By getting rid of these "60 Minutes" career traditionalists — those who still believe in the tenets of sound journalism and in the mission of this once-great institution — you get rid of those who say "we don't do it that way here." Both Alfonsi and Vega have also said that Weiss has bowed to pressure from the Trump White House; you may be reasonably certain that whoever replaces them will not make the same charge.

Is '60' in trouble?

History does tend to rhyme when it comes to network TV news. After buying RCA in 1986, GE slashed and burned its way through NBC News. After taking over CBS that same year, Laurence Tisch was even more draconian. Way back in the early '80s, then-CBS News president Van Gordon Sauter was nearly as controversial as Weiss in his campaign to reinvent the post-Walter Cronkite "Evening News." (Bill Moyers' memorable line after quitting: "Tax policy had to compete with stories about three-legged sheep, and the three-legged sheep won.") But this is different. There's a president in the White House who probably wouldn't mind seeing this show go away. Moreover, what if the Deep State at "60 Minutes" is even deeper than Weiss imagines? Four executives were dumped last Thursday, but one was scarcely mentioned in the subsequent news accounts. When he was a producer there, Draggan Mihailovich, the executive editor, did some of the most distinguished work at "60 Minutes" over nearly 30 years — stories on the Sudanese civil war, U.S. invasion of Iraq, Osama bin Laden, Islamic extremists in Pakistan. On and on and on. Can a show like "60 Minutes" survive without people like Mihailovich and the rest of the Deep Staters? I don't think so. I really don't think so.