CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is making big moves. This week, she declined to renew the contract of 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on the hellish conditions at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was pulled off the air last December for not offering enough deference to the Trump administration; Alfonsi was one of three departures from the program. Weiss also installed Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of her network's flagship newsmagazine program.
If you're having trouble remembering who Bilton is, that's because he's a specific type of dolt from a bygone era. There was a moment in the media industry in which one could build a lucrative career by being a guy with glasses and branding oneself as a tech reporter who "covers the intersection of technology and culture." Bilton spent many years executing this maneuver at The New York Times, where he edged out some stiff competition to briefly claim the title of the paper's worst columnist. His greatest hits include a column about the time he couldn't find a pen, and one about the cancer risks presented by wearable technology that was so factually fucked, it now contains a 203-word editor's note and a 98-word correction.
Bilton eventually left the Times for Vanity Fair, where he got busy pretending like he was the one who'd owned the Theranos story and getting all googly-eyed over the Apple Vision Pro, which he promised was "taking us into the future, into a new era of computing." I guess technically the jury's still out on that one.
But hey, who's to say that Bilton isn't cut out to run 60 Minutes just because he's never worked in broadcast news and has the résumé of a boring guy who is constantly wrong? Maybe he's grown a lot. If you want to judge him on his current merits, you can read the memo he sent to 60 Minutes staffers after his hiring was announced. It spends several paragraphs explaining the concept of linear time and includes the sentence, "Every part of how we lived back then has been transformed since then."
At the very least, they should keep this guy away from the teleprompter. Tony Dokoupil already has enough problems on that front.
