The venerable 60 Minutes kicked off its 59th season last month as part of the 2026 television schedule. The show has been in the news as much as it has been reporting the news this year, so people have been keen to monitor how the show looks and what it reports ever since its new executive producer, Nick Bilton, took over in May. The choice was controversial, but Bilton wrote an open letter to the staff when he started, laying out his goals. Now that we’re a few episodes into the news magazine’s first season with Bilton at the helm, what has really changed? Let’s get into it.
Bilton Hasn't Changed Much, At Least On The Surface
There is no question that much has changed at CBS News since Bari Weiss took over as Editor-in-Chief. One major change happened at 60 Minutes when Bilton was brought in. Longtime correspondent Scott Pelley was fired after he confronted Bilton on the new head’s first day, and some media watchers have been highly critical of any more potential changes, not to mention calling Bilton unqualified at times.
Bilton’s letter from May 2026 highlights some of the things he was looking at changing. In the note, Bilton wrote that he had a lot of ideas:
I have a notebook full of ideas. Some are about the show itself. Some are about the next generation of correspondents. Some are about the strange fact that we produce one extraordinary hour for one night a week in a world that consumes content around the clock. I'm excited to share them, and I'm confident you'll be excited by them, too.
Those ideas, at least so far, have not materialized, at least not for the average viewer, which I consider myself to be. I’ve been watching the show since I was a little kid, sitting on my dad’s lap in the 1980s. I go through phases, but it’s been a standard part of most weeks of my life. Now, like many, I end up watching the show in segments, often on YouTube, but from what I’ve seen this year, it seems like the same old 60 Minutes I’ve always watched.
I’m not alone in that. Guy Campanile, who was managing editor of the show before the major staff upheavals in May, pointed out the same thing in a recent interview:
We kept hearing about a notebook full of ideas that the new executive producer had, and the broadcast had been described as a melting ice cube and that changes had to happen, and the broadcast I’ve seen the first few weeks, in the broad strokes, in shape and form, not in content, does not look very different. So I’m trying to understand why it was all blown up.
We’re only a few episodes into Season 59, so things might change, especially editorially, and especially in the wake of Weiss controversially pulling a story last season. In fact, things probably will change more. Weiss and Bilton seem to have at least some ideas in mind, given his letter, but at least so far, those changes have yet to make an impact on screen.
