CBS host Trish Regan details a fierce power struggle at CBS News, where new boss Barry Weiss, who bought Free Press for $150 million, clashes with veteran staff over modernization. Regan speculates Weiss must fire the entire newsroom and unions to dismantle the "staid" culture, citing conflicts like correspondent Sharon Alfonso allegedly blocking his CCOT video story. Criticizing 60 Minutes' slow format and a $20 million Trump settlement, she argues CBS's "super left" ideology hinders progress, concluding that success requires streaming content with unpretentious personalities rather than fixing outdated television products. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fire The Entire Newsroom00:10:44
And we're live.
Thank you for your patience.
Wow, we had a lot of stuff to pack into this show today because a lot going on, as always, as we head into the weekend, everyone.
I am Trish Regan.
This is the Trish Regan Show.
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Careful.
CBS News.
Oh, my goodness.
These guys are back in the headlines and it's not for very good reasons.
It looks like the new boss there, Barry Weiss, is having a really hard time.
And I mean, really hard.
You know, anyone could have predicted this coming me, especially because I once used to work there and am pretty familiar with the culture and how they're very staid and they're very set in their ways.
And all of a sudden, this woman comes along and she's just been paid, what, $150 million for her free press site?
And they're like, who do you think you are, you print lady?
You opinion print lady?
You think you're going to remake the newsroom?
And she's like, hell yeah, I am, because that's what I was hired to do.
I was hired by, you see, David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, to try and get you guys into ship shape.
You're talking about CBS News.
That's where I hate to break it to you, Barry.
You should talk to me ahead of time.
Of course, I would have still told you to take the 150 million bucks, right?
But I would have also advised you that this would be one thankless job where you would get to, well, just nowhere really, really fast.
I think you're actually going to have to fire the entire newsroom if you're actually going to see anything fruitful out of this.
You'll probably have to get rid of the unions, too.
I mean, I don't really know how you bust up the joint given the sort of entrenched culture that has been there. for decades now.
I mean, decades.
You guys have heard my story, right?
About how, you know, they still had rotary phones.
I think Sharon, actually, who I'm going to talk about in just a second, Sharon Alfonso, who's there at 60 Minutes, she and I were Northeast Bureau correspondents together.
She's actually a hysterical person, a really great woman.
I don't even know if she's that liberal, frankly.
I mean, she's from Texas now, originally from, I think, Mississippi.
Yeah, Mississippi.
And her husband was a Navy SEAL.
So I don't know if she's extremely, left, but everyone else in the building is.
And apparently for some reason, Barry Weiss decided to pick a fight with Sharon.
Not a good person to pick a fight with, only because the whole building loves her.
Okay.
They love her.
And Barry, they don't like you.
And so I think you're all going up in smoke.
Okay.
So you get rid of Sharon.
Great.
You know, Sharon will find a job somewhere else.
I'm sure.
I think actually it would be great for Sharon to have another job somewhere else for sure, because, you know, who the hell would want to work at 60 minutes?
Seriously, these days.
I don't even know who's watching.
Anyway, so this is.
You can see the headline in the Daily Mail, CBS News veterans facing acts after speaking out against Barry Weiss, because apparently you don't speak to the boss like that.
Well, they're having some hard times because they don't see her as the boss, right?
They see her as a little chickadee that just came in and tried to tell them what to do.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, we own this.
I'll give you a good example.
So the building that CBS News is in across the street, they had a somewhat better building.
It was called the BMW building because I think they sold BMWs downstairs.
Anyway, that was where the 60 Minutes offices were.
Like when I was there, so this would have been like 2005, 2006 when I was there, they were still smoking in the offices.
Oh yeah.
You know, they were smoking up a chimney in there because they're like, how dare you tell us that we can't smoke in our offices?
Or Andy Rooney.
Andy Rooney used to have an office right down the hall from me at CBS News, and he'd have cocktail parties.
He'd bring all his friends over, and they'd sit there and watch the evening news, and he'd be like pouring the gin, which, you know, you got to kind of admire.
That's the way to live, right?
CBS News is like a relic, right?
It's a dinosaur.
It's from a whole other era, and there's something somewhat endearing about it.
The problem is when you're in a new environment with a whole new medium, a whole new news medium, and people are used to accessing content in a very different way, in a very quick way, right?
Not in a very slow and steady way.
Then it just doesn't fly.
On top of which, you layer in all the bias that's so inherent there in the entire building, and you got a recipe for a total disaster.
Plus, you know, what, a $20-some-odd million settlement that you had to fork over for one Donald Trump because you guys tried to influence the election.
I'm sorry.
I don't know how else to say it.
But, you know, when you cut up Kamala Harris like that and you slice and dice her when she's saying something that is completely incoherent and you actually make her sound sense, it makes some sense.
I mean hey, I got to tell you one, whoever did that, one deserves like an Emmy award, because that's what you call editing.
And two, you can't do that, okay.
And we live in a different era now, where things are far more natural right, all natural.
And so the canned scripted, slow 60 minutes evening news is done and over.
And you know what, if Sharon gets fired, more power to her, because I'm sure there's better things that she could be doing.
Scott Pelly, I mean, I don't know.
I think poor Scott doesn't have much of a future doing really anything.
Do I have a picture of him?
I may.
Oh, yeah.
He's the guy on the bottom.
He's on his way out anyway.
Let's face it.
Let's face it, he's all mad because they got rid of his executive producer, who was the guy who was running 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, because Bill was upset because Sherry Redstone wanted to sell that puppy, right?
Remember she, and so she settled the CBS suit with Donald Trump and the guy who's the executive producer was like busting apart, like, you know, smoke coming out of his ears.
And he resigned in a huff and it was this big thing in the New York Times.
Nobody really cared.
Anyway, now Scott Pelly, who was his sort of talent that he produced, he got on the air and was like huffing and puffing to blow the house down.
But that didn't really go anywhere because guess what?
He's got a new boss and the new boss says, I don't like you very much.
And David Ellison, who now owns the company, says, I don't like you very much.
And guess what?
We own 60 Minutes and we pay your salary.
So if you don't like it, please.
Leave.
Apparently this guy has a contract.
They're talking about buying him out.
They want him out of the building so fast.
But here's my thought on it.
It's not going to do you any good because you got Scott Pelley and you got 20 more little Scott Pelleys where that came from, so I don't think you got any luck changing anything over there.
How are you going to do it?
Think about this, I, when I worked there uh, always went out with a big camera crew.
You know, cameraman it was.
It was lovely.
You know somebody to do the lights, somebody to do the audio, etc etc.
But I also had a smart producer who knew that he could take a very small little camera somewhere and go and shoot everything himself.
But you see, the union didn't allow it.
So I wound up doing a ton of stories down in Latin America.
You wonder how I know so much about Venezuela, right?
I mean, in addition to having traded their sovereign debt back in the day at Goldman Sachs, I was like, hey, let's go to Venezuela.
We'll do a story down there because we could do it without bringing all the heavy camera equipment, but only out of the country because all the union rules were so strict.
So they are weighed down by unions.
They are weighed down by culture and they are weighed down by their ideology.
That's a super left.
So where are you gonna go?
Apparently Sharon, Alfonso and Barry Weiss got into it.
Uh, if you read in the NEW YORK POST, Alfonso apparently blew up at Barry Weiss and said, hey, you don't get to produce me.
This is my story.
You got that.
You don't get to produce me.
I mean, in fairness to Barry, all Barry was asking for is to make sure she had someone on record from the White House saying x, y and z right, because they were going out accusing them of this, that and the other with the CCOT video that they had.
By the way, everybody had that video.
My own producer, David, was down there months ago before 60 Minutes.
Everybody had that video.
So it was not like it was anything new.
And Barry was like, okay, if we're going to do this story, we're going to advance this story.
And one way to advance it would be to see if we can make any news from the administration.
Well, apparently the administration didn't want to have anything to do with it.
And so Sharon accused her of saying, hey, now the White House is going to dictate whether or not we get a story on the air.
Here's my advice.
What I would have done in that case, find the other side.
Okay.
I don't care if you're going to play a Fox News clip.
Would I kill you?
Would it kill you?
Or a podcast clip, whatever you want to play.
Just go out and get the other side of the story.
It's called Journalism 101.
And if the other side doesn't want to talk to you, you find the other side on record somewhere, somehow.
And, you know, maybe they don't look good because they didn't talk to you, but it doesn't matter.
At least you put something in there.
That's all Barry was asking for.
Oh, my goodness.
You'd think she'd ask for the moon and then some.
So they did finally air it.
It was neither here nor there.
Nobody really seemed to care.
But in the meantime, you're now looking at Sharon probably being out of a job and Scott Pelly being out of a job.
And I'm just warning Barry that there's more where that came from.
It's not going to fix it because you have systemically a problem in the institution itself.
Someone actually mentioned this to the Daily Mail.
They said a source that they spoke to.
You know, I can be right on record.
I'm just going to tell you, the place is a problem.
And by the way, they're leaking like a sieve, right?
They're talking to the media all the time.
All the people in that building, they're all miserable.
They hate Barry.
She can't believe, they can't believe she makes $150 million, you know, because of that free press little website she put together.
They added that CBS News is allergic to changes.
True, true.
Especially the 60 Minutes people.
True.
What I tell you about the smoking in the offices, right?
They lack respect for Weiss.
True.
This is exactly what I told you.
who previously ran the anti-woke outlet, the Free Press.
They don't think Barry Weiss, quote, is qualified to be their boss.
True, this is exactly how they feel.
They don't want a set of fresh eyes.
They don't want anything.
So you get the inmates running the asylum and Barry's like, what am I supposed to do?
And David's like, we got to fix this because David Ellison knows that the news is changing.
But I don't know if he's got the right asset to help it.
You know what I would do?
Honestly, like if it were me, I would try and just stream everything.
I'd get rid of the unions.
I'd say, we're going to change this product entirely.
Hey, Sharon, you get a ton of personality.
We don't get to see that on 60 Minutes.
Let me see it.
Let it rip, baby.
Let's like see the real Sharon Alfonsi.
Scott, you don't have a personality.
So sorry, you know, you're out.
But let's find people with some pizzazz that we can actually put into a streaming platform.
Inmates Running The Asylum00:01:25
And that's actually, by the way, where the opportunity is.
Whether or not they stay on and whether or not they've got the gut up and go to go do something else like this, we shall see.
As you guys well know, the only people that succeed over here are the people that, one, are transparent, two, have no affectations.
I guess that's one in the same.
And three, have a passion to be doing this and are willing to kind of, you know, let it all hang out, so to speak.
I think our camera went off the other day, didn't it?
Right on live air and there you were for all of it, all the uh blood, sweat and and uh glory, as they say.
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