Lifestyle
The Gen X Career Meltdown
Listen to this story with Steven Kurutz’s commentary about why he wrote it.
In “Generation X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material wealth.” Lessness, Mr. Coupland called this philosophy.
For many of the Gen X-ers who embarked on creative careers in the years after the novel was published, lessness has come to define their professional lives.
If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.
“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.
Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.
Gen X-ers grew up as the younger siblings of the baby boomers, but the media landscape of their early adult years closely resembled that of the 1950s: a tactile analog environment of landline telephones, tube TV sets, vinyl records, glossy magazines and newspapers that left ink on your hands.
When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn’t seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.
More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.
“My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s,” Mr. Wilcha said. “The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it’s just gone. It’s startling.”
Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.
Karen McKinley, 55, an advertising executive in Minneapolis, has seen talented colleagues “thrown away,” she said, as agencies have merged, trimmed staff and focused on fast, cheap social media content over elaborate photo shoots.
“Twenty years ago, you would actually have a shoot,” Ms. McKinley said. “Now, you may use influencers who have no advertising background.”
In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.
Last September, Ms. McKinley co-founded Geezer Creative, an ad agency intended to be a haven for Gen X talent. “We’ve been absolutely bombarded by creative folks over 50 — or even approaching 50 — because they’re terrified,” she said.
The shedding of jobs and upending of longstanding business models have come at a bad time for Gen X-ers. The cost of living has skyrocketed, especially in coastal cities, and the burdens of mortgages, children’s college tuitions and elder care can be heaviest in middle age. Retirement isn’t that far off, theoretically — but Gen X-ers are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys.
The old economy still holds sway in a few places — legacy media companies that didn’t get devoured by the internet, film studios that remain flush with cash. But even at those businesses the number of jobs has gone down, and the workers are uneasy. What’s to prevent their little island from going under with the next wave of change?
“The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.”
— Chris Wilcha, film director
‘Death Throes’
Steve Kandell couldn’t believe his luck. Growing up as a fan of punk and alternative rock in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, he had been an avid reader of music magazines — and now here he was, working for Spin, the Gen-X successor to Rolling Stone.
He assigned and edited features. He wrote cover stories about Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse and U2. Spin paid for his reporting trips and gave him weeks to write his articles, which could run as long as 5,000 words.
In keeping with the generational stereotype, Mr. Kandell had been a slacker in his 20s. He landed his first big job in New York in 2002, when he was 30. It was the early days of the internet, but print publications were still thick with ads.
So he was happy to sign on as an assistant editor at Maxim, a magazine that was part of the short-lived “laddie” trend. At its height, it had a paid monthly circulation of more than 2.5 million, far surpassing the readerships of GQ and Esquire, which began to look staid by comparison.
“I was in my 30s, making $31,000 a year,” Mr. Kandell said. “I remember an editor said, ‘You don’t want to work here? There will be a line around the block.’ There was this sense that you get to do this.”
By the time he joined Spin in 2007, the industry was in trouble. As readers spent more time online, magazines reliant on print ads were flailing. In the early 2000s, Spin’s monthly circulation was 530,000; by 2011, it was 460,000 and falling fast.
Like many other publications, Spin tried to remake itself as an online brand. It started an iPad version and beefed up its website to compete with a digital rival, Pitchfork. In 2012, the print edition went bimonthly, and Spin started charging less for ads. Then it was sold to Buzzmedia, an owner of music and celebrity websites. The print edition folded.
“We were in the death throes,” Mr. Kandell said, “whether we knew it or not.”
The changes affected other fields, too. When photography went digital, photo lab technicians and manual retouchers were suddenly as inessential as medieval scribes. The ubiquity of smartphone cameras and easy-to-use editing software made those in possession of the old skills seem almost quaint.
Chris Gentile, who was the creative director of the in-house photo studio at the magazine company Condé Nast from 2004 to 2011, said that top photographers used to earn five figures for a shoot. “Now,” he said, “you can hire a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500.”
Carl Chisolm, a photographer who grew up in Harlem and whose credits include shooting Anna Wintour for a MasterClass campaign, said that editorial budgets were already shrinking by the time he started his career in New York in the mid-2000s. “There’s no way you can survive anymore being strong at one thing,” Mr. Chisolm, 45, said. “I worked at a studio, I photo-assisted, I did production work — all while shooting small jobs for myself.”
Even now, he added, “if things are truly slow, I’m not above assisting friends on their shoots. I have a family.”
In advertising, brands ditched print and TV campaigns that required large crews for marketing plans that relied on social media posts, a trend that started with the debut of Instagram in 2010.
“That TV spot you spent six months on now becomes a TikTok execution you spend six days on,” said Greg Paull, principal of R3, a marketing consultancy.
Pam Morris, 54, a freelance prop stylist, noticed another unsettling trend a few years ago, when a U.S. client asked her to art-direct a crew in Asia remotely for a shoot. “They’re just outsourcing,” she said. “It must be cheaper.”
Ms. Morris added that, in her group chats with colleagues, the main topic lately has been the effect of A.I. and computer generated imagery on ad campaigns. “If an art director can say, ‘Give me an image of X, Y, Z,’ what does that mean for our jobs, if they don’t need to have actual photo shoots anymore?” she said.
Similar shifts have taken place in music, television and film. Software like Pro Tools has reduced the need for audio engineers and dedicated recording studios; A.I., some fear, may soon take the place of actual musicians. Streaming platforms typically order fewer episodes per season than the networks did in the heyday of “Friends” and “ER.” Big studios have slashed budgets, making life for production crews more financially precarious.
Typically, workers in their 40s and 50s are entering their peak earning years. But for many Gen-X creatives, compensation has remained flat or decreased, factoring in the rising cost of living. The usual rate for freelance journalists is 50 cents to $1 per word — the same as it was 25 years ago.
The precariousness has affected even those who have risen to corporate posts in the media industry. For nearly 20 years, Liza Demby managed writers in the marketing department at Nickelodeon, the children’s cable network. She started there in 2005, the year YouTube went live.
When viewers started dropping cable subscriptions, revenues declined. Ms. Demby learned to embrace new technology while surviving “around eight billion rounds of layoffs,” she said.
“My job never stayed the same,” she added, “because the industry was transforming under our feet.”
Last August, Nickelodeon’s corporate parent, Paramount, cut $500 million in costs and eliminated thousands of employees. In her 40s, Ms. Demby was out of a job.
Divorced and living in a rented apartment in Brooklyn with her two school-age children, she is drawing from her severance package while considering her next career move. Working freelance, she has come up with marketing ideas and creative content for family-oriented media brands.
“It’s exhilarating, but there’s an undercurrent of terror,” Ms. Demby said. “My severance goes until July.”
“That TV spot you spent six months on now becomes a TikTok execution you spend six days on.”
— Greg Paull, marketing consultant
‘Very Scary’
It seems fitting that Gen X-ers would reach middle age amid an upheaval. They always had cursed timing.
Their moment on the cultural center stage was brief — roughly between the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” in 1991 and the rise of Britney Spears at decade’s end. Many Gen X icons died young and tragically, a list that includes Kurt Cobain, the Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anna Nicole Smith, Tupac Shakur, Brittany Murphy, David Foster Wallace, Shannen Doherty, Elliott Smith, Adam Yauch and Elizabeth Wurtzel.
“As a Gen X-er, you more or less expected to get reamed,” the author Jeff Gordinier wrote in the cultural history “X Saves the World.”
Ms. Morris, the prop stylist, didn’t work for six months during the Covid-19 pandemic. “It was very scary,” she said. She and her husband, who have a teenage daughter together, sold their Brooklyn apartment and moved into a rental.
The profit from the sale allowed them to pay off debt and put some savings aside. But then Ms. Morris’s husband, a 59-year-old creative director and artist, was laid off, turning them both into gig workers.
Ms. Morris recently took a course to become a postpartum doula. “I’ve been making images to sell things to people for many, many years now,” she said. “I’m looking for the next act.”
Aside from lost income, there is the emotional toll — feelings of grief and loss — experienced by those whose careers are short-circuited. Some may say that the Gen X-ers in publishing, music, advertising and entertainment were lucky to have such jobs at all, that they stayed too long at the party. But it’s hard to leave a vocation that provided fulfillment and a sense of identity. And it isn’t easy to reinvent yourself in your 50s, especially in industries that put a premium on youth culture.
“I know people who said, ‘Screw this, I’m going to become a postal worker,’” said Ms. McKinley, the ad industry veteran. “There are still a lot of people who are freelancing, but it’s dried up quite a bit in recent years. It’s painful.”
“There’s no way you can survive anymore being strong at one thing.”
— Carl Chisolm, photographer
‘What Now?’
As opportunities and incomes dwindle, Gen X-ers in creative fields are weighing their options. Move to a lower-cost place and remain committed to the work you love? Look for a bland corporate job that might provide health insurance and a steady paycheck until retirement?
One of the many Gen X-ers asking these questions is Mr. Wilcha, the TV and movie director. In the mid-2000s, he made a devil’s bargain for someone who grew up on punk rock: He started shooting commercials for Chevrolet, Facebook and Apple, among other companies, to support his family and fund his passion, documentary films.
He had a cult hit with his debut, “The Target Shoots First.” It was a deadpan chronicle comprising footage he had shot during his first job out of college, at Columbia Records; HBO broadcast it in 2001. But cult hits don’t pay the bills. When he shifted his focus to making TV commercials, his documentary projects remained unfinished.
Then came a plot twist. Those commercial jobs grew scarce because of the consolidation of ad agencies and the rise of marketing content plucked from social media. And with Hollywood banking on superhero movies, Mr. Wilcha faced new competition from acclaimed directors who had once specialized in the kind of mid-budget films that the studios had practically stopped making.
“Now it’s a knife fight for every job,” he said. “The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.”
He decided to recommit to his first love. The result, the documentary “Flipside,” released last year, is a personal film about the trade-offs required to support yourself as an artist. In it, he weaves together footage from his unfinished projects while grappling with his career choices in a wry voice-over narrative.
For the theatrical release, he worked with Oscilloscope, an independent distributor founded by Mr. Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and he often presented the film himself.
“It felt very ’90s,” he said. “It was that indie rock model: Get in the van, tour with the thing, get bodies in the seats. It made no money. But what it did do — and this is what I believe as a Gen X creative person — it confirmed my belief that continuing to make stuff is the path forward.”
Mr. Gentile, the former photo studio manager at Condé Nast, went through something similar. The company was cutting costs as the consultancy McKinsey & Company roamed the halls, and he came face to face with his own irrelevance. He was 40, with an artistic background.
“Who would hire me?” he thought. “Maybe this is where I jump off.”
As a sideline, Mr. Gentile, an avid surfer, had opened a surf shop, Pilgrim, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He quit his day job and dedicated himself to the store. He and his wife, Erin Norfleet Gentile, have since expanded it into a clothing brand.
“One thing I’m grateful for, and it’s a strength of my generation, is we weren’t promised anything,” Mr. Gentile said. “I was prepared to struggle.”
Mr. Kandell, the former magazine editor, also had a reckoning.
After Spin stopped appearing on newsstands, he took a job at BuzzFeed, the news and entertainment site that was seen as the future of media at the time. By 2017 BuzzFeed was just another struggling outlet that was doing mass layoffs. Mr. Kandell, then in his mid-40s, married with a child, left for another media outlet. His wife also worked in media.
“Then we had a second kid, and we lived in a small New York apartment,” he said. “And it felt like the only thing we and our friends talked about was, ‘Well, what now’?”
He and his family moved to California, where he took an editorial position at a tech company. The job gave him some security and allowed him to contemplate a second career.
He went back to school and earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology. For the past three years, Mr. Kandell has continued at the tech company while practicing as a therapist on nights and weekends to earn his state license.
He’s still adjusting, though, after having had a career as a Gen X rock guy. “It’s not the same as working at a scrappy music magazine, where you have all the back issues in an attic somewhere,” he said. And yet, he added, he likes having a job that is separate from his old identity. And the mental health sector seems likely to survive the next disruption — and perhaps even benefit from it.
At a party recently, someone asked Mr. Kandell what he did for a living. He took a breath and for the first time he answered, “I’m a therapist.”
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
On a 75-mile cliff-hugging stretch of highway in California, traffic is way up, despite soaring gas prices. And locals expect the busiest summer in years.
The road is Highway 1 in Big Sur, which reopened in January after three years of repair and reconstruction following a pair of landslides. Drivers can once again embark on the state’s most famous road trip, covering the 100 miles between Cambria to the south and Carmel to the north without leaving the two-lane coastal highway. And they’re heading out in big numbers.
Caltrans estimates that as of May, Big Sur restaurant and retailer guest counts are up 40% from last year, and that northbound traffic at Ragged Point, the southern gateway to Big Sur, has risen 900% year-over-year.
People pose for photos near Bixby Bridge. Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking around the bridge.
Safety cones prevent parking along Coast Road near the Bixby Bridge.
“Take your time,” said Kirk Gafill, co-owner of the popular Nepenthe restaurant and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, offering advice to travelers. “You’re going to be sharing the road with a number of people.”
As travelers rediscover the road, the cost of driving has been shooting skyward. California’s average gas price ($6.11 per gallon as of May 26) is up 26% from the year before. In early April, rates hit $9.99 at the isolated gas station in the Big Sur community of Gorda.
For spring and summer travelers, these numbers would seem to pose a stark question: Stay home and save money, or head for the coast because the road is finally open and it’s still cheaper than flying?
So far, the latter answer is winning big.
Fog lingers off the coast of Highway 1.
“We are definitely seeing a huge uptick in our reservations,” said Megan Handy, assistant general manager at the upscale Treebones resort. She estimated that bookings are 30% or more ahead of last year, and rates are unchanged since then. But “it’s still not feeling super crowded, which is nice. Everything still feels kind of calm.”
But added traffic has raised some anxiety. On May 19, Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking at Bixby Bridge, one of the region’s top photo spots.
Over the years, the number of cars parking near the bridge — often illegally, sometimes impeding emergency vehicles — has risen. The proposed parking moratorium won’t take effect until the supervisors discuss it further.
-
Share via
Busy as things are, several business owners pointed out that many international travelers have not yet returned — perhaps because most make their plans more than six months ahead, perhaps because of global politics, perhaps a little of each.
The biggest challenge for businesses during this resurgence? “Restaffing and retaining,” said Handy at Treetops.
At Nepenthe, Gafill said his business has seen a 45% boost in guest volume since the road’s reopening. Gafill said he would have expected a 35% pickup, “simply by virtue of reopening the highway.” The additional 10%, he said, might be “all that pent-up demand,” aided by “a very beautiful and very dry winter,” followed by a mild spring.
A lunch crowd dines at popular restaurant Nepenthe.
Another possible factor: Nobody can be sure how long the road will remain open.
To cope with the influx of people, Gafill said, “everybody is trying to recruit and retain their existing staff.”
At the Ragged Point Inn, where rates dropped as low as $149 nightly last fall, rates are back over $200 and staffers are suggesting that customers book at least six months ahead. The inn has reopened its snack bar for the first time since early 2023, and management is investing in capital upgrades and staging live music on weekends throughout the summer.
Business “is up over 100%,” said Diane Ramey, whose family owns the inn. “I know not all of our neighbors are having the same lift, but everybody is doing better.”
Traffic approaching Bixby Bridge.
A visitor poses in an oversized chair at Big Sur River Inn.
Even at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery above Lucia, the road’s reopening and coming summer season have made a difference. Bookings are up an estimated 30% at the hermitage, which rent rooms and cottages (for two nights or more) to visitors who agree to its requirement of silence.
Big Sur business owners advise visitors to travel on weekdays for less traffic and the best hotel rates, and to get on the road as early as possible.
Since its opening in 1937, the highway has been vulnerable to landslides and shifting ground, operating on a longstanding cycle of landslide, closure, repair, reopening and then another landslide, or sometimes a fire. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Big Sur coastline as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the western United States. The 2023-2026 closure was the longest in the highway’s history.
Over time, road crews have used increasingly sophisticated strategies. In the most recent efforts, Caltrans said, it used drones to help survey the slopes and remotely operated bulldozers and excavators to reduce risks to workers.
During the closure, no traffic was allowed on 6.8-mile span from just north of Lucia until about a mile south of the Esalen Institute. Drivers detoured inland by way of U.S. 101.
Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
hide caption
toggle caption
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter sent every weekday morning.
When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.
The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.
The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.
And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.
That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars
CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
hide caption
toggle caption
Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.
The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.
Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.
With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.
Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.
Notably, he has no experience in television news.
Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.
She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.
A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.
Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.
In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”
In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”
The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.
Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.
After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)
Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now
In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.
Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.
The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.
Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.
Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)
David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.
The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.
But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.
When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.
David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.
Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.
The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.
The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.
As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.
-
Louisiana4 minutes agoLouisiana among states selected to receive federal funding for rare earth projects
-
Maine11 minutes agoSix Maine food producers win Good Food Awards
-
Maryland14 minutes agoSpotted lanternflies are reemerging in Maryland. Here’s what to know.
-
Michigan19 minutes ago2 historic Michigan lighthouses to split $120K in preservation grants
-
Massachusetts26 minutes agoKaren Read files lawsuit against Massachusetts State Police and Canton Police
-
Minnesota29 minutes agoSchool bus company’s inspection history in question after kids hurt in Hamline University crash
-
Mississippi34 minutes agoFerris, West to discuss Mississippi folk artists at UM Museum – The Oxford Eagle
-
Missouri41 minutes agoAmerican Shaman agrees to suspend kratom sales in Missouri
