Is the ‘60 Minutes’ Blowup a Threat to Ellison’s Empire?

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1:23It is Monday, June 8th. For people in Hollywood, the media scandals in New York usually feel like another world. I remember during the height of the Roger Ailes downfall at Fox News and all the noise around the awful behavior there, nobody at the Fox studio in L.A. seemed to care much. The Murdoch successfully kept it all separate. But this 60 Minutes blowup at CBS is kind of different. If you're not following it, last year David Ellison installed Barry Weiss, an opinion writer and ideologue, to run CBS News. A couple weeks ago, she fired the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Tanya Simon, and a bunch of experienced producers and correspondents.

2:00Then she installed Nick Bilton, a technology columnist and burgeoning Hollywood screenwriter, as the new executive producer of TV's most prestigious and highest-rated news program. Predictably, the staff at 60 Minutes freaked out. Scott Pelley confronted Bilton at his first staff meeting, calling him unqualified and said he'd never be welcomed there. and then he also claimed that Barry Weiss had tried to influence the coverage in favor of Trump which is interesting considering how much the Ellisons have courted the Trump administration first to get Paramount in the first place and now to close this 110 billion dollar Warner Mount merger we always talk about.

2:36Pelley was fired of course but last week the three remaining correspondents including Leslie Stahl they said they would stay but only as long as Weiss and Bilton let them do the kind of journalism they've always done. We don't want to see 60 Minutes die, they wrote. A big mess, and a lot of people, myself included, have asked, why is David Ellison letting this go on? After all, CBS News is such a minor part of the Paramount business, and there are ways to curry favor with Trump without blowing up the most successful news franchise on TV. So is there something else going on here? And does this whole situation threaten in other parts of the company, including whether the Democrats in blue states will sue to block the Watermount merger.

3:18What ultimately does this say about Ellison's leadership at a time when lots of people want to know what kind of leader he's going to be of two studios? Lots to discuss with Lucas Shaw, our Monday guy. So today it's 60 Minutes, the blow up, the impact throughout the Ellison media empire. From the Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany and this is The Town.

3:42Okay, we are here with Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg. Welcome back, Lucas. Do you have Knicks fever? You are in New York. Yeah, I'm going to be standing outside the garden with Charles Oakley and all the other people who have been banned over the years. We're going to be shouting. We're going to be screaming. Not tonight. Donald Trump's going to be there, so no parties outside. Especially given I have a lot of family in New York. I'm all in on the Knicks. Although I don't really want it to be a sweep. I'd like it to be a better series than that. I just hope it doesn't go six games so Jim Dolan doesn't get the revenue from that last game at MSG.

4:14Is that petty? I think it would be fun if it ended in New York. So I'd rather it end in four or six, but I hear you. You want to see Chalamet and Ben Stiller storming the court? Like, come on. Not really, but I think for... David Zasloff, you know, raising his arms like he had something to do with this. Like, no, we don't want that. He was just at the French Open. I saw that he's getting to travel the world and go to all the best sporting events. That's a good transition into the Warner Mount merger, which we've been talking about endlessly. And we had some developments this past week. And, you know, normally I don't really care about these New York media scandals.

4:49I mean, I care personally, but not for the purposes of this show. I care about this 60 Minutes scandal because I think there are potentially larger implications for both David Ellison and his leadership of one studio and potentially two. and potentially whether this deal closes at all. I want to know, first of all, why you think Ellison is letting this happen? Because there's a very easy solution to all of these problems. You think he should just fire Barry and walk it back? No, not necessarily fire Barry. He could say, listen, I believe in her as an editorial voice. We need someone else with her to manage these properties day to day because she has lots of ideas and it's becoming clear that she needs a little bit of help on the management, especially the talent management side.

5:44Someone needs to be there who has relationships with these star talents. It's just like a movie studio. You have to coddle your talent. You have to make them happy and you have to have them believe in your vision and what you're doing. You can't sit in your office with two bodyguards out front and come down from high and hire an inexperienced executive producer of the show and get rid of all the people that these people have relationships with and expect it to be okay. I want to get to that, but I'm just curious because you've written about the importance of talent. Do you actually think that individual talent matters on 60 Minutes?

6:21Absolutely, yes. You don't need them all, but you need recognizable talent on 60 Minutes because that is the nature of the show. That is why it's different. So it's not just people who will show up 60 minutes regardless of who it is. They want to see Whitaker. They want to see Stahl. They want to see each of those people, you think? It's part of the DNA of the show. That these are every man or every woman correspondents that take you through the world. And they have a particular style of interviewing and of editing and writing that appeals to people. And they are the phase. That's why it was so damaging when Anderson left.

7:01I mean, the Barry Weiss plan for 60 Minutes was hinging on Anderson because she knew that he has the best connection to the widest possible audience. And he's not 80 years old. He's, you know, a generation younger. And then he up and left. So what are you left with? You're left with Scott Pelley, Leslie Stahl, and the rest. And all of a sudden, you have this meeting and Scott Pelley blows it up and they fire him. So I do think 60 minutes talent matters. It's not the only thing that matters. The brand is really strong and they can break new talent and bring people in. But you can't, I think if you start from scratch and have to rebuild and people tune in in the fall and it's entirely new people, that does matter.

7:45Right. Well, it is classic inexperienced management to come in as a change agent and to immediately tear everything up. Right. to fire the executive producer of the show. I mean, it's been a year, but yes, I hear you. But to fire a bunch of the correspondents. And without explanation. Right. And we see it with executives all the time, especially sort of people who are supposed to be younger and more entrepreneurial and maybe more tech savvy, whatever it is, they come in and they blow shit up. And it usually causes a lot of headaches. And whether it has the positive effect in the long run is, you know, depends on the situation.

8:25All right. So that gets back to the question of why Ellison is letting this happen, because one theory is that he just doesn't care about CBS News and he only wants to do things that will help him get his$110 billion deal closed. And if Donald Trump and his people like that, there is chaos at CBS News and there is someone in charge that is either Trump coded or Trump aligned, however you want to put it, that that is only the only thing that he cares about. And then there's this second kind of notion put out there by Paramount that Ellison does care very much about CBS News. And he feels that the show and the division itself has to be reinvented for the streaming age.

9:11And if that means blowing it up now, then so be it. They have to blow it up now, even though the ratings were up 9 % last year and it's 60 Minutes is the number one program in the news category. that he needs to blow it up now and bringing in someone like Nick Bilton with no experience and a tech columnist is the way to do that. I don't know that he thinks that Nick Bilton is the way to do it. I think that he is putting his trust. He signed off. Yes, but he's putting his trust in Barry to figure it. Look, there's no question that Paramount is taking a lot of steps to curry favor with the Trump administration.

9:47They want their Warner deal approved. They want to get this past them. But I think we sometimes overstate how much the moves being made are specifically about kissing up the Trump and not just that like that is a positive byproduct of it. Like if you look at what actually ties a lot of these people together, I don't think it's Trump. Right. Like I think Barry Weiss appeals to a sort of basically rich people in a few cities like Republicans or rich centrists who call themselves Democrats. and kind of the tech industry and a lot of those people, a circle that David Ellison is very much in, right?

10:28People who had homes in the Palisades were very in on Barry Weiss. My understanding is over the last few years, Nick Bilton has become very close to Barry Weiss. So they're all part of the same social circle. And if anything binds them together, it's more Israel than Trump. If you look at the people around David Ellison, his top lawyer, his top spokesperson, the head of his news division, now the producer of 60 Minutes, they all have similar views on Israel, which one would consider they are zionists right and they feel strongly that you know their anti-semitism is on the rise and that is something that ties them i think much more strongly than any fealty to trump because i think some of those people whether it's ellison or some of the people who work for him would say we're not trumpy but you know we're just doing what we got to do yeah and mecan delrahim the top lawyer at paramount he explicitly said that opposition to this deal is fueled in part by anti-Semitism, which I think was surprising that he would say that.

11:26Yeah. And, you know, there's also this other theory that Larry is the hidden hand here, that Larry is very pro Barry Weiss and is excited about some of these changes. And while David Ellison may recognize that her changes are going to cause chaos and potentially cause problems for him throughout the company. He, I don't want to say powerless, but he knows this is what his dad wants and he's going along with it. Do you agree with that? I always struggle with how much we think Larry is really involved because my sense is on the deal, for example, he wasn't super involved until the end, right? One Paramount source told me that he has never met Barry.

12:09I don't know if that's true, but... Yeah, when he needed to call David Zaslav or try to convince Warner Brothers, he would show up because David asked. But Larry's got 10 million things going on. His number one focus is not paramount. I think even in the case of David Ellison, like CBS News takes up a disproportionate amount of the press coverage, partially because journalists like to leak and it's noisy and we're all narcissists and all that stuff. And there's concerns about democracy, but it's not like the number one priority for the business, right? Like David Allison is way more excited that Scary Movie is the number one movie in the country than he is about anything that's happening with CBS News.

12:47But you know what? We're not talking about Scary Movie because we're talking about 60 Minutes. And that is going to be a theme that continues throughout the summer. It's going to get worse because they're going to, if they get this deal, they're going to buy CNN. And you know, that place has been a source of constant news for how many years? I know. And they're going to make hires. like Leslie Stahl's quote you know the statement that they put out Leslie Stahl, Bill Whitaker and John Wertheim basically was a ransom note it was a threat saying we are staying because we don't want 60 minutes to die but we're looking we're monitoring and we're checking out to see what you do and if any of the powerful hand comes down and tries to change our stories or you hire Joe Rogan which is not happening or you hire someone who's embarrassing to us we're out yeah and that's a tough place to operate from if you're nick built in and your mandate and what you sold them on is to completely disrupt the show we'll see how that plays out i i don't really have much pity for him because he's getting paid a fortune to do a job that he's not super qualified for but he is this is going to be a rough first start i will be very curious if he can survive a year just because like i assume with Barry and Allison behind him.

14:05You know, Allison in particular is an incredibly loyal person. Like, you look at the people around him, he will take someone he's known for a while over someone with more experience. But this has a little bit of the whiff of the Chris Lick situation where the knives are out from day one. Any little thing on the broadcast, anything that we would have glanced over a year or two ago is going to be broken down and scrutinized. And then the question is, like, do you lean in do you try to lead the season in the fall with an elon musk interview like that would be certainly newsworthy something that 60 minutes would do but if they get it it's going to be because elon is aligned with trump and everyone's going to go nuts over that do you buy into the idea because you know as this has been going down the paramount argument that 60 minutes needs to be reinvented and brought into the modern age right which is something that they obviously David Ellison has said about their streaming, sir, about the broader business.

15:03His whole pitch is we're going to modernize the company. We're going to be tech forward. Do you think that 60 Minutes, even with the fact that it has a, you know, a very strong base of viewership needs like a big change or a little change? Like, where are you on the paramount contention? I would say it needs investment on the digital side. I do not think it needs a wholesale disruption on the television side. I mean, this is a Hollywood show. We are a Hollywood business show. What do we look at first and foremost? The audience, the ratings, the ratings are there. And I know the secret of 60 minutes has always been the lead in.

15:39It gets huge lead ins from NFL, the masters, March madness. But, and when you look at the ratings, they go down significantly from 9.1 million viewers when they don't have that lead in, but you have the number one show. You don't, you don't take friends and remove three of the friends and add in, you know, people that you've never heard of. You just don't do that. Like, it's working. But could they have a bigger investment in digital? Sure. Could they have other nights of the week? We forget. They tried this 20 years ago with 60 Minutes 2, and they had a separate night of the week with another 60 minutes on it.

16:18And ultimately, they had a scandal there, and they ended up not doing it. But like there there's precedent here for doing I think you take the the mothership and expand around it. And they were also expanding with stuff for Paramount Plus. Yeah. Are there extensions of 60 minutes on Paramount Plus? Are there ways to amplify what they're doing on YouTube, Instagram, X, TikTok, all those places? No question. You know, if you just assume if you just sit on a TV property and think you don't need to do anything about it, you're asking for failure. um i did just because i was curious and this is i admit a bit of an unfair comparison but you know barry was brought in as sort of the digital wonderkind right to reinvent it how do you think the the online followings for the free press compare to 60 minutes probably not very strong at all um 10 times 60 minutes 10 times larger on youtube 4 million to 400 000 about four times larger on Instagram, 10 times larger on X, almost 10 times larger on TikTok.

17:21Obviously, 60 Minutes has decades of history, so it matters. But I do think to put things in perspective, when you say something has no digital following and needs to reinvent itself, it's not like it's dormant. It just needs more. Yeah. Is that the argument, though, that it doesn't have a digital following? What does it actually mean when they say they want to modernize it? Does that mean get younger, have younger correspondents, tell younger stories? because on social media, 60 Minutes is fine. Their videos do really well. That has not been fully explained by Nick Bilton. It has been the excuse that he has given for why they fired the executive producer and fired some of the correspondents.

17:56They say they need to modernize it, and it's sort of their answer to the critics who say it's being changed to appease Trump. So, you know, yes, they do need to modernize it, but bring in a Derek Thompson as a correspondent. and bring in like younger, credible journalists to do this kind of work. Like you can build around the base. You don't have to blow it up. This episode is brought to you by Hulu. The second season of Hulu's addictive drama series, Paradise, exceeds expectations, says TV Insider. Starring Emmy, Golden Globe, and Actor Award nominee Sterling K. Brown, Emmy nominee Julianne Nicholson, and featuring a sensational turn from Shailene Woodley, paradise delivers nail biting twists and turns for your emmy consideration in all eligible categories including outstanding drama series an outstanding lead actor in a drama series for brown for more information visit hulu.com slash fyc this episode is brought to you by holiday in by ihg everyone knows holiday in right or they think they do because though they have the same name they've got a whole new energy they kept the global icon status and upgraded pretty much everything else.

19:09We're talking modern rooms with real reset mode vibes, spaces that feel like your living room, just a little more low key chic and dining done right from breakfast to dinner and drinks. Whether you're traveling for work or getting away for a minute, it's comfort that hits different. So yeah, Holiday Inn. It's a new day and a new stay. Book your next day at HolidayInn.com. Let's move on from this because I'm mostly concerned with the Ellison question and the larger question of this deal. Does this make you worried about what he's going to do with the Warner assets? Is this his first big test as the CEO of Paramount?

19:48I think yes. I mean, I think this is the first meaningful scandal, for lack of a better word, and first meaningful test of his leadership because it does suggest, A, he's saying that he values loyalty, like you said, that he won't be bullied by the media. He doesn't seem to care what the media thinks of his changes. It also suggests that he has an ideological bent here, that there is a larger ideological guiding light for him with Barry and with Nick Bilton and with the direction that is either coming from him or his father that could seep into CNN. And if you start to have that as a litmus test, first question, where are you on Israel?

20:35Not great for a news brand. Yeah, I think there was a belief among some at Paramount and in the Ellison camp that 60 Minutes and CBS News had tilted too far to the left and they're trying to bring it back to the center. And then there are those journalists and certainly many who are kind of politically on the left who feel that it's more than that, that they are tilting it to the right, that they are trying to curry favor with Trump. And, you know, Scott Pelley just gave that interview at The New York Times where he he gave a couple of specific examples of Barry Weiss seeming to kind of meddle in the product.

21:11Yeah, she wanted the behavior of the Minnesota protesters changed to be more Trump aligned and a couple other things like that. But I mean, CBS has sort of been the pain point for Ellison all along, right? He had the Colbert flare up before he even fully took over. A decision that also aligned with what Trump wanted. Right. Even if he said he had no part in it. And even the settlement of the Trump litigation before they closed the deal. And now Barry has been kind of a never ending source of headaches for him. But at what point does he step in? Or does he or does she have free reign? At what point does this become a distraction that is too much for him?

21:54Because I don't know if any of this impacts the deal. That's the ultimate question here. I don't think it does. You don't think it does? No. Why not? Well, one, it has no bearing on any antitrust concerns. It's just his management. You would think it impacts the deal if you thought that Trump were seriously considering blocking the deal. But nobody thinks Trump is trying to block the deal. The people who are debating blocking the deal are the state attorneys general. And I don't think this really has much bearing on what the state attorneys general do, nor what nor what regulators in Europe are doing.

22:25Oh, I disagree there. I think this has a lot to do with what the state attorneys generals are going to do, because I think the overall antitrust case is pretty weak here. But they may file anyways because of the political pressure and the fact that Rob Banta, the attorney general of California, he's up for election this year. A lot of these attorneys general in blue states have immense political pressure on them. And if they don't do something, there are going to be a lot of very pissed off Democrats that feel now that the media is being hijacked by Trump aligned billionaires in order to serve the president's interests.

23:06I agree with all that. I just don't think what's happening at the news. I think I don't see the direct connection between what like if he fires Barry Weiss tomorrow, which I don't think is going to happen. I don't think suddenly Rob Bonta goes, okay, we're done. Don't need to do the suit. I don't know about that either, but Eric Gardner, my colleague at Puck, he just interviewed the lead antitrust litigator for Paramount and asked that question. What about the editorial independence at CNN? Shouldn't that be a factor here? And Jeffrey Kessler's response was, I think, pretty reasonable. He said, that's a value people can hold.

23:39It's not an antitrust issue. Antitrust focuses on whether concentration eliminates competition, not on social policy questions about editorial direction. He went on to say that obviously people are pissed about this, but the separating out the filing of a lawsuit from the actual legal issues, I think is pretty smart here because this is going to get filed, in my opinion. Not because they have a winning case, but because they feel they have to. Yeah. Unless, look, Ellison's been pretty politically savvy throughout the process. There is always a chance that they negotiate a settlement. But yeah, I think it is more likely than not that there is a suit.

24:22My colleagues have reported they expect one to be filed, you know, by the end of June. Yeah. And the argument being that this would thwart competition, lower wages, lead to widespread job losses throughout Hollywood, all of which are true. Yeah. All the reasons that the average worker in Hollywood is against this deal. Yes. Right. It's a monopsony case, not a monopoly case. It is it's it would impact kind of the business market more so than the customer. Yeah. And we don't have to get into the pros and cons of the antitrust argument. We've discussed that on the show before. People can differ in their views and what the market is here and whether they need this merger to compete with Netflix or whether they should be judged against the market for studios, which this would obviously eliminate one of those.

25:04Do you think all of this reduces the odds that Barry has any role in CNN should the deal go through? I do. I think that the nuclear bomb of putting her in charge of CNN would be so noisy and would lead to another round of all this. It's an easy decision. Just bring in someone else. I mean, that's if they even keep CNN. Right. I keep hearing that one of the fire alarm last minute push the oh shit button responses for the Ellisons is going to be OK. We'll divest CNN. Yeah. Will that make you happy and sell it to Barry Diller or whoever? They don't actually need it. The combined company, everyone's like, oh, under Warner, they could never sell CNN because it was the anchor of their cable carriage discussions.

25:51No, they don't need it. CBS is the anchor of their television properties now. So if it's going to be a huge headache, maybe you want it, maybe Larry wants it or whoever wants it for influence. But if you're Ellison, you already kind of have that with CBS. Why not just sell it to Barry Diller or whoever? Right. I realized one thing we didn't talk about. Because you kept asking, like, when is he going to put a business person in to sort of steady the ship and also maybe curb some of Barry's impulses? and that brings us back to the unorthodox reporting structure that he put in here which is that he had barry weiss report directly into him instead of to george sheeks who the cb head of cbs news would have historically had historically reported into although i think george sheeks is probably loving that now george speaks it gives him plausible deniability on all of it but he's exactly the type of person that you're talking about right a very steady hand trust like knows how to run a business has worked inside of these big companies forever um and probably would have given barry some some good guidance on some of these things yeah i know it's funny there were some reports this past week that like people and the other elements of the company are upset by what's going on at 60 minutes and cbs news and i was like no shit i mean that clearly it was reported by someone who doesn't know hollywood at all like that's all these people do is bitch about what's going on at the news division because they're all on the other side of the issue and they can't say so publicly but they you know this this was true at fox in the fox news days when they had the studio in la and then all the nonsense that was going on at fox news with harassment and all the election stuff and they just sort of put their heads down and you know complained privately and the murdochs managed to manage that have entertainment assets while also having this news slash propaganda outlet.

27:46And if that's the plan for Paramount, David Ellison has got to learn how to manage that. And it is an interesting window into how he manages that that we're seeing play out right now. I don't know if Fox's entertainment assets did just fine, even while they own Fox News. And they had amazing liberal oriented creators like Seth MacFarlane, Steve Levitan, Ryan Murphy, all these people that were more than happy to work for Rupert Murdoch when all this Fox stuff was going on. So this notion that David Ellison is going to become this pariah throughout Hollywood, I don't know. Or maybe it's different times now.

28:23Maybe you can't separate that now. And the stuff going on at 60 Minutes is going to impact the creative arms of the company. Yeah, I tend to think that people don't turn down the check, right? There are a lot of... Fox doesn't have the same level of entertainment business that it did, you know, 10 years ago. But they're doing deals with a lot of social media creators who I'm sure whose politics are to the left and they're not holding their nose at getting in bed with Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch. And I think David Ellison, if he's willing to spend on your$150,$200 million movie or he wants to green light your TV show, the number of people who are going to be principled enough to say no to that because of how they feel about politics, I think it's a short list.

29:07yeah maybe they lose a project or two though yeah goes elsewhere in a competitive situation maybe i don't know the bigger problem for them is just getting this deal done because as we know starting in september there's a seven million dollars a day ticking fee that is charged against the company for every day that they don't close this deal if the attorneys general do file a lawsuit this month the question will become does a judge enjoin the deal during the lawsuit or does it let the deal close while the lawsuit plays out and then we get into a legal question we both think that this deal is going to go through though it's just a question of when yeah or are you starting to are you starting to doubt that no no no I'm not I'm not waving I think it will go through but I think that this is a problem I think that there will be a lawsuit and that they will be forced to make concessions to settle it yeah but how, how big those concessions will be?