An unnamed industry source tells Wonderwall that Paramount's owners could remove Weiss once the Warner Bros. Discovery merger closes, pointing to sliding ratings at 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News.
An industry insider is telling anyone who'll listen that Bari Weiss won't survive the next ownership change at CBS News. The claim, reported by Wonderwall, is that once Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closes, the Ellison family running Paramount could move to replace the network's editor-in-chief over what the source calls weak ratings.
"Everyone is wondering how soon it will take the Ellisons to pull the plug once the merger goes through," the insider told Wonderwall. It's one claim from one unnamed person, and CBS hasn't responded to it. Worth saying upfront: nobody at Paramount has confirmed any plan to remove Weiss.
Weiss, 42, took over as editor-in-chief in October 2025 after Paramount bought her outlet, The Free Press. Since then she's reshuffled 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings, and the numbers on those shows are genuinely mixed.
What the ratings actually show
The 60 Minutes season premiere, which carried an interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pulled in 7.94 million viewers per Nielsen, a 21 percent fall from last year's opener and down 33 percent in the 25-54 demo, according to figures reported by USA Today. But that premiere followed an NFL lead-in that was also down sharply, which complicates any clean read on the drop.
The next episode, built around an interview with Patrick Clancy — whose ex-wife has been accused of killing their three children in 2023, an allegation she has not been convicted of, actually grew 5 percent in total viewers and 18 percent in the key demo year-over-year, per figures The Hollywood Reporter cited. There was no new episode on September 27 because CBS ran the VMAs instead. The next 60 Minutes airs October 4.
CBS Evening News, now anchored by Tony Dokoupil since January, is averaging under 4 million a night, roughly back to where the show sat before he took over, the Los Angeles Times has reported. CBS Mornings has reportedly hit record lows this year too, prompting the network to bring Norah O'Donnell back alongside Gayle King and Nate Burleson for a relaunch built around faster pacing.
The departures behind the numbers
The turmoil isn't just ratings. Executive producer Bill Owens quit in April saying he'd lost editorial independence. Tanya Simon was replaced by Nick Bilton in May, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were let go the same month. Scott Pelley was fired in June after Bilton accused him, in a staff memo, of disrupting a meeting and treating him with what the memo called incivility and contempt. Pelley has separately told the New York Times that Weiss pushed CBS coverage in a particular direction around the killing of Renee Good, an allegation Weiss has not publicly addressed. Anderson Cooper, who'd contributed to the broadcast for two decades, also left this year.
The Wonderwall insider's harshest line is that 60 Minutes, once television's most-watched news broadcast, is now trailing weekday editions of World News Tonight. That part is a comparison, not an independently verified ranking.
None of this settles what happens when the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal actually closes. Until regulators sign off and the Ellisons make a call, Weiss's job is a rumour with a Nielsen chart attached, not a done deal.
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