{"id":912111,"date":"2026-06-12T10:12:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/the-chaos-at-cbs-news-shows-the-limits-of-blow-it-up-leadership\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T10:12:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:12:39","slug":"the-chaos-at-cbs-news-shows-the-limits-of-blow-it-up-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/the-chaos-at-cbs-news-shows-the-limits-of-blow-it-up-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"The chaos at CBS News shows the limits of \u2018blow it up\u2019 leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bari Weiss never intended to play things safe. \u201cI wanna blow this up,\u201d she reportedly told colleagues<\/a> early in her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the legacy broadcaster whose parent company, Paramount, bought her news and opinion site, the Free Press, in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Paramount CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss to remake CBS News<\/a> as it struggles with an aging audience, programming that trails rivals, and reputational damage from its decision to settle a $16 million lawsuit brought by the Trump administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weiss\u2019s tenure so far has been explosive. Staff reportedly fear<\/a> that she is compromising editorial norms, and some have accused Weiss of editorial meddling<\/a> that favors the Trump administration. (Weiss has rejected the accusations<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The most seismic episode was longtime 60 Minutes<\/em> journalist Scott Pelley\u2019s ouster last week after he clashed<\/a> with Nick Bilton, the executive producer Weiss had just hired to lead 60 Minutes<\/em>. At a staff meeting, Pelley questioned whether Bilton, a tech journalist with no broadcast news experience, had adequate credentials<\/a> to run the show and said that he would never be welcome at 60 Minutes<\/em>. After Pelley\u2019s firing, Weiss told the newsroom that CBS had tried to engage with Pelley and \u201cfind a way back,\u201d but \u201cunfortunately we weren\u2019t able to do so.\u201d (CBS News told CNN<\/a> that Pelley\u2019s claims were not credible and that there is no political interference at the news organization.)<\/p>\n

Even for an executive as audacious as Weiss, the tumult arguably has become a distraction, drowning out\u2014at least for now\u2014any sort of change narrative she\u2019s hoping to advance.\u00a0Indeed, many media observers\u2014inside and outside the network\u2014have gone so far as to suggest that demolishing the status quo seems to be central to Weiss\u2019s mandate. Pelley last week accused Weiss of \u201cmurdering\u201d the CBS show<\/a>, shortly before he was fired. In an interview with CJR, Lowell Bergman, a former 60 Minutes<\/em> producer, questioned why Weiss<\/a> would immediately disrupt the storied news magazine program when it remains the network\u2019s crown jewel and the nation\u2019s top-rated television newsweekly.<\/p>\n

Organizational change experts say that this kind of rupture is almost never necessary, and that the messiest transformations are often the least effective ones. \u201cA generation of people actually believe that disruption is virtue, and that\u2019s an enormous mistake,\u201d says Ronald Heifetz, a senior lecturer in public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Change can be hard, especially for companies with deeply entrenched cultures. But a drama-free reinvention of an organization is possible\u2014and if you can pull it off, it\u2019s the ideal way to transform a company, Heifetz says. \u201cIn trying to change a successful and large organization, you want to find minimally culturally-disruptive innovation,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhen you look at innovative companies, they are building from a lot of strategy, values, structures, procedures, competencies that work, and it should be preserved\u2026Otherwise, you\u2019re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.\u201d<\/p>\n

Start with the why<\/strong><\/h2>\n

To be clear, even the most drama-free company overhaul won\u2019t make everyone happy. \u201cThe goal is not to eliminate discomfort, but to prevent distrust and dysfunction from overtaking the story,\u201d says Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. The first step, she says, is being \u201cvery clear about why change is needed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cKeep repeating that message in plain language, because when people don\u2019t understand \u2018the why\u2019\u2014economic, marketing, technological, whatever it is\u2014they will fill in the gap with their own explanation,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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CBS News\u2019 audience and ratings numbers justify some kind of change. But they don\u2019t explain the purge of 60 Minutes<\/em>\u2018 top talent after what Pelley called a \u201ctriumphal year.\u201d<\/a> The show had garnered 9.1 million viewers on average in its most recent season, a 9% increase from the season prior. Pelley said that going into the ill-fated meeting with Bilton, he and his 60 Minutes<\/em> colleagues were looking for an explanation as to why CBS had parted ways with several of the show\u2019s high-profile correspondents and leaders, including executive producer Tanya Simon, and correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Alfonsi had accused Weiss of political interference after Weiss abruptly pulled<\/a> a scheduled segment on torture in the Salvadoran prison receiving Trump administration deportees. Weiss said at the time that the piece wasn\u2019t ready and urged the reporters to seek additional comment from the White House. Alfonsi said her ouster <\/a>from the show was an effort to \u201cpenalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to the 60 Minutes<\/em> team, Pelley told the New York Times<\/em><\/a>: \u201c[T]hese bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.\u201d CBS has said<\/a> it cannot share why someone was fired, for legal reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Selling the future<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If Weiss failed on the \u2018why,\u2019 she seems to have struggled equally with expressing to her staff \u2018what\u2019s next.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

Laying out a vision for the future is critical for a drama-free transformation, says Rita McGrath, an author and academic director in executive education at Columbia Business School. Weiss\u2019s vision for the future of CBS News has centered on<\/a> restoring audience trust, building brands around talent, and pivoting to a \u201cstreaming mentality.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a memo to 60 Minutes<\/em> staff introducing Bilton, Weiss and CBS News president and executive editor Tom Cibrowski said they were seeking a new approach that involved \u201cexpanding 60 Minutes<\/em> beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined 60 Minutes<\/em> at its best.\u201d<\/p>\n

But \u201c[Weiss] hasn\u2019t succeeded in really making that compelling enough for those that are involved in the situation,\u201d McGrath says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A company transformation has to be framed as a learning process, rather than top-down execution, says Edmondson. \u201cYou can\u2019t roll out a change program, you have to cycle it out. It\u2019s a journey of hypothesizing, trying, learning, tweaking, trying again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Edmondson says Ford\u2019s experience<\/a> under CEO Alan Mulally exemplified the principle that turnarounds are works-in-progress that improve with honest feedback. Mulally revived the automaker by creating a single, unified strategy and a culture of accountability. Years into the overhaul, Mulally\u2019s then-heir apparent Mark Fields recalled<\/a> how the CEO had empowered executives to defy Ford\u2019s longstanding culture that buried bad news. At one point, Fields raised red flags about a model rollout, and Mulally applauded him. \u201cThat meeting was a tipping point at Ford,\u201d Fields said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To his credit, Bilton said he intended to enlist 60 Minutes<\/em> staffers in setting the show on a new course. In an introductory message to staffers, he said his first order of business was meeting with the show\u2019s team to \u201chear what you\u2019re working on. Hear what isn\u2019t working\u2026In about 30 days, I\u2019ll come back to all of you with where we go from here. It will be a conversation that we have together.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the right approach, experts said, at least on paper. \u201cIf leaders are willing to acknowledge the uncertainty that lies ahead, and share what they\u2019re seeing, share what they\u2019re learning, and show that they can change course in response to good data, then others will do that too,\u201d Edmondson says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Slow and steady<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The most successful transformations look less like detonations and more like construction projects\u2014unglamorous, incremental, and mapped out well in advance. The third step in a drama-free overhaul\u2014\u201cremoving obstacles between where we are and where we want to get to\u201d\u2014demands a \u201csystematic\u201d approach rather than \u201ca chainsaw,\u201d McGrath says. Turnarounds take time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She points to Adobe\u2019s well-timed decision to disrupt itself<\/a> and evolve from selling boxed software to offering software as a service. McGrath recalls how its CFO spent weeks on the road convincing investors that the years-long transition would work: \u201cHe gave them what he called \u2018markers\u2019: \u2018This is how you will know whether we\u2019re doing well or not, whether we\u2019re succeeding or not, and this is what you could hold us to.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Patience is in short supply in every corner of corporate America, but buying time\u2014from the board and investors\u2014is part of a leader\u2019s job too, says Heifetz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Creating a shared sense of value can ease any transformation, McGrath says. She says private equity firm KKR<\/a> went to extremes to do just that when it brought C.H.I. Overhead Doors in 2015. It paired the deal<\/a> with a broad employee-ownership model, giving every worker equity while also improving operations, safety, and productivity. The company was later sold to Nucor<\/a> in 2022, awarding all 800 employees cash payouts of about $175,000<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re trying to bring people along, then what you want is to help find common ground, something we can all agree on, and then build from there,\u201d McGrath says.<\/p>\n

The question for Weiss and CBS News is whether bringing people along is a priority\u2014or if, as they blow things up, they\u2019d rather people get out of the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Claire Zillman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bari Weiss never intended to play things safe. \u201cI wanna blow this up,\u201d she reportedly told colleagues early in her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the legacy broadcaster whose parent company, Paramount, bought her news and opinion site, the Free Press, in October.\u00a0 Paramount CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss to remake CBS News as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":912112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31396,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-912111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chaos","category-shows"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}