60 Minutes Is Burning. Bring Marshmallows

Long-time readers of this space surely know of my delight in the demise of CBS News and 60 Minutes; I give them far too much attention based on the merits. Of late, though, the misfortunes of the elite communists being slowly turned out of the newsroom at the organ Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built (talk about two of the most overrated personages in the history of media) have become utterly fascinating.

Last week, Sharyn Alfonsi was fired. She was a correspondent on 60 Minutes who utterly stunk at her job. If you don’t know anything about her but read this column often, you might remember that Alfonsi was the reporter who, two days after Vice President JD Vance went to Munich and delivered a landmark speech about the clear disconnect between the stated values of Western Civilization NATO is supposed to protect and the execution of those values by increasingly authoritarian socialist governments in Europe, delivered a decidedly favorable report on German efforts to suppress online speech the government doesn’t like. (RELATED: Margaret Brennan and the Good Germans at CBS News)

It was one of the most bizarre bits of Trump Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen. Alfonsi voiced it like there was nothing particularly untoward in breaking down people’s doors and pilfering their phones and computers as a consequence of trolling stupid Green Party communist politicians on Facebook.

Well, now she’s off to Podcast Land, fat severance check in tow. And the old bulls in the 60 Minutes newsroom are quite ornery. CBS News head Bari Weiss hired a veteran investigative journalist, Nick Bilton, as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. Bilton’s curriculum vitae is more interesting than anybody else at that show, if for no other reason than Martin Scorsese has, to my knowledge, not asked any of them to write the screenplay for a movie. The Bilton hire coincided, if it wasn’t consequential, in Alfonsi being let go along with Cecilia Vega, another of the on-air correspondents, and Draggan Mihailovich, who was the Number Two for Bilton’s predecessor — a woman named Tanya Simon whose father Bob Simon worked for CBS News for about a million years.