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Bulwark Takes

Can “60 Minutes” Survive Bari Weiss? (w/ Max Tani)

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Politics, Society & Culture, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bari Weiss just spiked a "60 Minutes" story on the CECOT scandal, sparking outrage inside CBS and across the media world. Sam Stein and JVL are joined by Semafor’s Max Tani to break down what happened, why Weiss made the call, and how Trump’s shadow looms over CBS News.

Read more in Morning Shots: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-and-co-cant-keep-their-lies-straight-epstein-files-bondie-doj-weiss-cecot-cbs

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. I am joined by JVL and Max Tani of Semaphore, frequent guest, friend of the program, I should say.

0:08.6

We're going to be talking about Barry Weiss in this highly controversial decision that she made to, for the time being, Spike a 60-minute story on Seacott and what was happening there, specifically the torture of Venezuelans who were brought there.

0:24.2

This is basically all people in the journalism world are talking about right now, but not just the journalism world.

0:29.1

People like us are kind of obsessing over this for what it says about the future of 60 Minutes and Barry Weiss.

0:34.5

JVL, before we get to Max's reporting, I just want your top line thoughts.

0:39.3

I mean, she's doing what she was hired to do.

0:42.5

So Barry Weiss was hired to help make the merger go through with Skydance and Paramount.

0:50.4

And this is happening within hours of Larry Ellison saying that he will personally backstop $40 billion in the attempted hostile takeover of Warner Brothers by Paramount.

1:01.6

What's funny is the Ellison's care about the movie studios and the intellectual property and the platforms.

1:08.6

But in order to get the deals, they need the government and the

1:12.1

government to buy in. And what the government cares about is they care about CBS News, not even

1:17.6

broader CBS, but just CBS News and CNN. And so the Ellisons are trying to demonstrate that they will

1:23.2

make sure that CBS News and then by extension, CNN, should they win this hostile takeover bid,

1:29.4

that they'll be good soldiers for Trump and that Barry Weiss is reliable to be friendly to the

1:34.1

administration.

1:34.8

And she is who we thought she was.

1:36.2

Max, how did this go down?

1:38.4

As I saw it last night, basically out of nowhere, the CBS 60 Minutes Twitter account posts that they're going to be preempting a story that had been set to run.

1:52.1

The explanation was it wasn't, you know, error later.

1:55.2

And then we started getting more and more explanations.

1:57.1

Well, Barry Weiss didn't think it was reported out enough.

2:01.1

We get some more stuff from her today about they didn't get anyone on camera from the administration to talk about it.

...

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