Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, has addressed for the first time in public the ratings difficulties the network has faced during her year at the helm. Speaking about the flagship Sunday program 60 Minutes, she suggested that audience size was not her top priority.
"I could never build anything if I were focused on the precise number of people that happen to tune in to the second feature on 60 Minutes on a given Sunday," Weiss said at an industry conference on Wednesday organized by the tech publication the Information. The news organization did not offer press credentials. She added that, overall, the show was doing "tremendously well".
Weiss carried out a sweeping overhaul of 60 Minutes in late May. She removed the show's executive producer and parted ways with three leading correspondents, among them Scott Pelley. Even so, the program has had trouble matching last season's average of 9.1 million viewers per episode.
Its latest episode attracted only 5.64 million viewers, which Variety described as "one of the smallest audiences for the program in years". It was the lowest-rated sixth episode of the weekly show this century, a distinction the fourth episode of the season also holds.
The program's numbers depend heavily on whether a widely watched NFL game airs ahead of it. The weak ratings have come despite a strong run of guest bookings and segments that made news. Not every result has been poor: the 4 October edition averaged more than 10 million total viewers.
Weiss was also questioned about the recent merger between CBS parent Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN. She had earlier been rumored as a possible leader for the cable news channel, but chief executive David Ellison chose to keep CNN chief executive Mark Thompson in place, at least for the time being.
Asked whether she would want to run CNN, Weiss answered: "I want to focus on doing CBS News, trust me. This is a big enough challenge."
She also said she is not preoccupied with criticism of her time at CBS News, which has come from both inside and outside the organization. Her approach, she said, is to "put the blinders on, tune out the noise and focus". She added: "I'm not doing anything I'm doing for popularity's sake."
