Even before this week’s firing of 60 Minutes star reporter Scott Pelley, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had already done incalculable damage, not only to the 60 Minutes brand, but to the profession of journalism, American democracy, and the cause of Israel that she proports to hold so dear. Let me repeat. She had already brought untold damage to Israel, the free press and democracy. And then came the explosive meeting1 that brought the “murder,” of 60 Minutes, as Pelley called it, into the public eye.
The demise of 60 Minutes is journalism’s darkest hour. And Weiss did this all in the name of loyalty to people, named Ellison and Trump, who will jettison her to the curb as soon as they need a scapegoat. The political landscape is littered with those whom Trump has used and spat out, among the latest victims being Netanyahu himself. Israelis may still naively cling to their love for Trump, but he does not love them, because he does not love anyone not named Donald Trump. Bari Weiss should know that. Maybe she does.
The murder of 60 Minutes is proof positive that Paramount must not be allowed to gobble up CNN. This has now become a First Amendment emergency.
Let’s look at this in greater depth, beginning with some personal background.
Throughout my childhood and beyond, I had little desire to become a rabbi. My first love was journalism. My first paying job was covering the high school football team for my town newspaper. After college, when two career paths presented themselves to me, rabbinical studies and journalism, I looked at that fork in the road and chose both paths, the seminary by day uptown near Columbia, and a journalism master’s program by night downtown at NYU. I found the two programs to be perfectly complementary, helping me to hone skills needed in both arenas - idealism, a passion for people, the ability to look at complex problems from multiple perspectives. And a love of questioning.
I learned how to do interviews that were tough but fair, and how to drill down to the truth, just like all the ancient rabbis and modern scribes did. Never to be afraid to ask uncomfortable questions, and the more uncomfortable, the better. “He who asks is a fool for five minutes,” my first NYU instructor, David Rubin, the chair of the journalism department, taught us. “He who does not ask is a fool for life.”
I was taught the nuts and bolts of conducting interviews, learning two lessons above all:
Never submit questions in advance, and
Never - ever - give the interviewee the power over what material I’m going to use.
Bari Weiss should have learned that.
My mentors in this dual career path were sages like Abraham Joshua Heschel2 who famously prayed with his feet, taking his brand of activist spirituality to the streets; and Edward R. Murrow, who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable - with facts. My sacred writings were the Talmud, Bible, Midrash, the AP Stylebook, All the President’s Men and John Hersey’s Hiroshima3.
And the most sacred moments of my week were the final minutes on Friday before Shabbat, when the setting sun signaled the onset of rest… and the hour, every Sunday, just after the football game, when the ticking stopwatch awakened us to the task at hand as a new week began, reminding us just how much our world is in need of repair.
Rabbi Tarfon says: The day is short, the task is abundant.” (Avot 2:15)
Tick…tick…tick…
Benjamin Disraeli is quoted as saying, "The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end." Journalism was my first love and I thought 60 Minutes would be there forever. I thought a free press was here forever too, enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
What makes this week’s events so terrifying is that we now must understand, if we somehow didn’t already, that nothing in our democracy is beyond Donald Trump’s capacity for destruction.
Trump’s American Carnage typically begins gradually, with a drip, drip, drip and a tick…tick…tick, then it all comes crashing down with ferocious immediacy of a bunker buster. With regard to the free press, Trump has degraded it incrementally, by insulting reporters, and calling their news outlets “enemies of the people” and “fake news” over and over again. Even A.I. couldn’t tell me how many times Trump has insulted CNN’s Kaitlin Collins. It’s a lot, and it’s troubling how normalized that abusive treatment has become, while none of the other White House reporters protest. The gaggle has been gagged.
This gradual but relentless degrading of journalistic norms is what led, inexorably, to the sudden convulsions that happened at CBS this week. It couldn’t have happened if journalists who put their livelihood and even their life on the line with every comma were treated like the national treasures that they are, instead of hired help. Bari Weiss flushed the crown jewel of news programs down the toilet, by order of the Ellisons.
Trump destroys everything he touches. Our alliances. Our deterrence. Our moral standing. Now he’s destroyed 60 Minutes. I didn’t think that could happen
I was lulled into a false complacency by the professionalism of Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Leslie Stahl, Anderson Cooper, Ed Bradley and Scott Pelley and all their compatriots. I was led to believe the high standards would last forever. Just last year, Pelley delivered a courageous college graduation address for the ages, to the graduating class at Wake Forest. He sounded prophetic, like Heschel, when he said:
In this moment, our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack…. Why attack universities? Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power? … Today, great universities are threatened with ruin… First, make the truth seekers live in fear (of retribution, censorship or deportation). Sue the journalists and their companies for nothing. Then send masked agents to abduct a student…then send her to a prison in Louisiana, charged with nothing. Then move to destroy the law firms that stand up for the rights of others. With that done, power can rewrite history, with grotesque, false narratives. Power can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. This is an old playbook, my friends.
Pelley’s untouchable, I thought.
And so is 60 Minutes. Blessed are the truth seekers.
How we lived for those moments when the bad guy would run the other way when Mike Wallace entered the room. We cheered the courage of the tobacco whistleblower, cried at “The Music of Auschwitz” and gasped at the revelations of My Lai. When Bill and Hillary Clinton came on to discuss Gennifer Flowers, we chose to believe them and entrust him with the presidency, but we didn’t believe John Ehrlichman’s protestations about Watergate.
We thought it would last forever, that our sacred fourth estate would always be safe. If the free press could survive Nixon’s enemies list, if it could outlast Joseph McCarthy and mimic the Muckrakers during Trump’s first term, even in the face of deep fakes and conspiracy-driven social media, it certainly could survive Trump 2.0.
I was wrong, and somewhere, Richard Nixon must be kicking himself (or more likely, kicking Checkers) at how foolish he was to give in to those “Jew-boys” in the media back in his day. He just needed to sue the pants off everyone and hide the tapes in his bathroom in San Clemente. What a fool!
“Everybody hates you now!”
If I were to pick one moment where Paramount’s tick…tick…tick turned into a boom, I believe journalistic integrity was partially done in when the greedy Ellisons and the amoral Weiss politicized the CCOT story, but the real coup de grace was when they allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to choose his interviewer.
They may have thought they were giving Israel a fair hearing in a world filled with anti-Israel bias. What they did instead was fuel old antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling the media while - and this is even more important - letting down the Israeli people. They let Bibi off the hook at a time when he needed to be called to account.
One of the few tidbits of truth ever to come out of the mouth of Donald Trump occurred this week when he told Bibi (per Axios), “Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."
And what is “this?” Trump thinks “this” is just about continuing to bomb Lebanon. But “this” is also the series of catastrophic policy choices that led to October 7, the conduct of the Gaza War itself and the disastrous undermining of Obama’s agreement with Iran that looks pretty good right now. There’s a lot of “this” there.
The biggest “this” is the cynical alliance Netanyahu struck with the GOP that purposely undermined Israel’s bipartisan embrace in Washington. “This” is the greatest threat Israel faces right now, and “this” is what Weiss and her buddies have been cultivating.
Just how much Israel is universally despised can be seen in a jaw-breaking new Pew survey. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Israel’s polling numbers in America are almost identical to Trump’s.
To compare these figures to the rest of the world, see below4
You can’t blame these dismal figures on antisemitism or social media, as Bibi did on 60 Minutes. In America, even a full third of the right-wing dislikes Israel.
This is an existential five-alarm fire for Israel, and Bari Weiss had a chance to address it by giving Netanyahu the Mike Wallace-style interview his country and ours needed him to have. And she failed.
Netanyahu has refused to submit to an interview by a mainstream Israeli news outlet for years. He also has refused to allow for an independent non-political inquiry into October 7. Right now the most comprehensive independent Oct. 7 report out there isn’t yet even published in English; it’s Amos Harel’s new book, entitled “6:29,” after the precise time the Hamas operation began.5 Listen to Harel’s first English language interview about the book on the “Unholy” podcast and you’ll get a good idea of why it’s so important to expand this investigation.
You’ll also see from Harel’s work why real journalism is so crucial at this time, and why Scott Pelley was not joking when he insinuated that Bari Weiss has turning the world’s most respected news magazine back into a lead-in for “Murder, She Wrote”6 only this time minus Angela Lansbury.
Weiss is complicit in Netanyahu’s evasion of accountability by allowing him a cream-puff interview. Letting him nix the scheduled interviewer (reportedly Leslie Stahl) was an insult to the profession and to Stahl, who evidently had been preparing for weeks. Major Garrett, who is not even a 60 Minutes regular, did an OK job (barely), but that’s not the point. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Any American outlet who interviews Netanyahu in the future should simply spring an Israeli journalist on him, or at least someone who knows what Israelis have been dying to ask him. Surprise him by having Ilana Dayan (Israel’s Mike Wallace) come out from behind a curtain. Let him squirm.
C’mon Bari! I admired what you were trying to do at The Free Press. But now it’s clear you’ve chosen to be an apologist rather than a journalist. Those recent 60 Minutes interviews of Netanyahu and Trump are not how real journalists do journalism. Network news doesn’t need apologists; it needs more truth tellers. We have never needed real journalism more than now.
The murder of 60 Minutes is proof positive that Paramount must not be allowed to gobble up CNN. This has now become a First Amendment break-glass moment.
Churchill said in June of 1940, “The Battle for France is over. The Battle for Britain is about to begin.” Just exchange the words “France” and “Britain” for “CBS” and “CNN.” The battle for CBS is lost. But we can save the free press and our democracy, and we can save CNN.
We talk of people having their fifteen minutes of fame, but in truth, it’s 60 minutes. The Talmudic tractate Pirke Avot states, “There is no person who does not have their hour.”7 Scott Pelley had his. Now we have ours. 60 Minutes will return, on another platform and in another guise, hopefully with some of the same people. But right now we each are writing our own hour-long episode, one that cannot become a lead-in to Murder, She Wrote.
If we can stem the tide of the Weiss-Ellison-Trump attack on our press freedoms, and if the electorates in Israel and America find their democratic voice this fall, future generations will say, when all is said and done, that this was our finest hour - our finest 60 minutes.
But the clock is ticking.
Pelley’s statement:
There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.
Scott Pelley 11:26 PM · Jun 2, 2026
Heschel understood the connection between the worlds of faith and politics. He was once asked by a journalist “why he [as a religious leader] had come to a demonstration against the war in Vietnam,” he said “’I am here because I cannot pray’.…Confused and a bit annoyed, the journalist asked him, ‘What do you mean, you can’t pray so you come to a demonstration against the war?’” Rabbi Heschel replied, “’Whenever I open the prayer book, I see before me images of children burning from napalm’” (Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011] p. 17).
The classic first paragraph of Hersey’s Hiroshima:
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died, Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go in-doors, catching one streetcar instead of the next— that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
New Pew world survey:
The show last aired exactly 30 years ago. But I can still hear Pat Summerall doing the promo of the CBS Sunday evening lineup toward the end of the football game
.
from Pirke Avot:
This essay is beautiful, Rabbi. Thank you for this heartfelt tribute to 60 Minutes and to Scott Pelley.
Everyone who is complicit, everyone who knowingly supports this regime is a Quisling. Everyone.
Good afternoon Rabbi, Yours is the perfect melding of doing a Rabbi's work and that of a journalist. I'm glad that you and many others are speaking up on behalf of Scott Pelley and for journalistic freedom.
Several fine journalists have now joined MTN. Honest reporting is so important. Keep up the good work.
Thank you!
b.weiss thinks she's clever because of her wealth. She is a nothing!