CBS’s flagship news magazine show 60 Minutes had its season premiere Sunday, the show’s first episode since new CBS News boss Bari Weiss shitcanned three anchors (Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Scott Pelley) and fired most of the show’s top staff in June. Did millions of new viewers, thrilled to see what Free Speech hero Weiss had wrought, excitedly flock to watch her revamped 60 Minutes?
Eh, not so much, as The New York Times reports (gift link):
Viewership for the season premiere of “60 Minutes” fell roughly 21 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen, making it the lowest-rated premiere of the long-running show in recent memory.
The Nielsen number — 7.9 million viewers in total, down from 10 million last year — is a disquieting result for Bari Weiss, CBS’s editor in chief, whose overhaul of “60 Minutes” has become an early test of her tenure.
Oh golly, that’s too bad. People just weren’t too thrilled about seeing what new Executive Producer Nick Bilton, whose name we keep misreading as “Nick Bitcoin,” had done to the venerable standby of middlebrow prestige journalism. They may not have even noticed his innovative new graphics, “like a sleeker-looking stopwatch during the show’s signature ‘tick, tick, tick’ introduction,” as the Times put it.
Yeah, we searched for half a minute for a comparison of the old and new versions of the watch graphics, but then shrugged and decided it didn’t matter. Just like CBS News with Bari Weiss running it.
You can also use the button below to donate an amount of your choice at Paypal.
Ever insistent on being “fair,” the Times points out that 60 Minutes may also have suffered from low ratings because, unlike in previous years, the foot-the-ball game preceding Sunday’s season premiere wasn’t the only game on TV; Fox also carried a big NFL head-trauma contest that started at the same time, so ratings for CBS’s f’ball show were also way lower than last year. But CBS’s hoped-for “novelty factor,” from rubberneckers curious to see what rough beast Weiss sent slouching toward broadcast, failed to materialize.
The show had some good old insider storytelling, like an exclusive interview with that Air Force pilot who was shot down, then rescued, early in Donald Trump’s stupid war in Iran. New anchor and doughy pantsload Ross Douthat fretted about how AI might kill us all or just ruin children’s brains, and he got the honor of making the season premier’s only overt reference to the show’s new Weiss Era, saying, over the trademark tickticktick sound effect, “That clock is ticking, and so is ours. For almost 60 years, it has meant the same thing: Journalism you can trust. Where we're headed, we're going to need it.” Then he genuflected and added “All Hail Great Leader,” we guess.
As media critic Oliver Darcy notes on Bluesky, 60 Minutes isn’t Weiss’s only ratings disaster, either:
The season premier also included a good old-fashioned “Look at these assholes” segment, in which Lesley Stahl interviewed longtime DC grifters Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, who have graduated from penny-ante vote-suppression schemes and fake accusations of sexual assault to big time grift, where they’re raking in big cash from convicted felons hoping to get pardoned by Donald Trump.
Here’s an edited version of the segment that CBS posted to YouTube, in which the two smarmy jerks are as smarmy as ever, even as they’ve allegedly hit the big time:
With all the sincerity of a low-level mafia guy insisting that he’s a legitimate contractor, Wohl explained that one of the people they helped get a pardon paid a million bucks for the unique skills that only he and Burkman can provide. Namely, “our advocacy and our services and our strategery. A lot of this is just strategery.” He pronounces it “straTEEgery,” as if it were a real professional asset and not a word made up by SNL to mock George W. Bush.
When Stahl seemed shocked that they’d charge a million dollars to give clients a chance at a pardon, Burkman said she should look at what their competitors ask for lobbying, and explained that “advocacy requires years of knowledge and training and working in government,” although if you want to get all technical about it, neither has ever worked in government at any level, and most of their knowledge and experience has been in the field of hawking conspiracy theories, usually with little success. We had actually forgotten, until we trawled the Wonkette archive today, that Jacob Wohl holds the dubious distinction of being shitcanned from The Gateway Pundit for his poor journalistic ethics.
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button.
Jacob Wohl holds the dubious distinction of being shitcanned from The Gateway Pundit for his poor journalistic ethics.
That’s like a turd not being allowed to get flushed on account of being too shitty.
He actually used 'strategery' seriously?