On Television

The Bari Weiss Effect on “60 Minutes”

CBS News’ editor-in-chief has pledged to “speak for the seventy-five per cent” of people on the center right and the center left; the reality is different.

By Vinson Cunningham, October 18, 2026

Close to Christmas in 1968, the journalist Mike Wallace went to Atlanta, Georgia, to the home of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Earlier that year, King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Now Wallace, filming a segment for a new magazine-style news program called “60 Minutes,” on CBS, sat on the King family’s handsome couch with one leg perched on the seat, looking somewhat ill at ease. A well-appointed Christmas tree feebly defied the air of sorrow in the room. Across from Wallace sat Coretta Scott King, the Reverend’s widow. The King kids were quiet and poised, letting the camera inspect their faces, putting on a show of mild bravery for the nice reporter and all the people out there watching at home. Wallace asked after the family. Was the season sad? Then, zooming out:

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King answered in her artful way, assuring Wallace that there were “many more people” who shared her husband’s commitment to nonviolent struggle than there were young Black radicals of various stripes ready to resort to violence.

The King-shaped moral vacuum had given Wallace a kind of civilizational anxiety. Without the charismatic clergyman, what kind of unruly Black-underclass anger would take the stage? That fear didn’t belong solely to Wallace. “60 Minutes” had come along at just the right time to draw a picture frame around a particularly perilous passage in the landscape of the country.

Part of its purpose, from the beginning, was not only to deliver new facts but to interpret ragged events for a nervous audience of relatively prosperous, largely white viewers who shared Wallace’s concern about the shape and tenor of the future. That cohort’s curiosities and anxieties were, it seemed, the unspoken rationale for the new show’s existence. Could America, they all seemed to be asking vicariously, through Wallace’s stentorian voice, ever just be normal again?

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The fifty-ninth season of “60 Minutes,” which premièred in September, arrives at a similarly disorienting juncture in the life of the American polity.

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CBS, the country’s unofficial home for geriatric entertainments—stuff like “NCIS” and the shuffling-zombie game show “The Price Is Right”—has become an unlikely protagonist in a morphing media scene.

Last summer, its parent company, Paramount, completed a merger with Skydance Media, an outfit founded by David Ellison, an actor turned media mogul whose father, Larry Ellison, happens to be one of the richest people on the planet. Ellison [fils]’s most high-profile hiring decision was to enlist Bari Weiss—the former Times Opinion editor and founder of the center-right publication The Free Press—as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Read more: The Bari Weiss Effect on “60 Minutes” – The New Yorker

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/the-bari-weiss-effect-on-60-minutes