Morley Safer of 60 Minutes was my father. He would be disgusted by what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS -Sarah Safer

Morley Safer of 60 Minutes was my father. He would be disgusted by what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS
Sarah Safer

My father joined the program when I was eight months old and retired 46 years later. He would be encouraging journalists at CBS to speak out

Fri 5 Jun 2026 07.00 EDT

The end of the 60 Minutes broadcast as we know it has sickened millions of longtime viewers, colleagues, and all of us who are offended and threatened by our current administration and its cronies’ assaults on the first amendment. The news of Scott Pelley’s firing hits particularly hard. He spoke of “risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast”.

Having literally grown up with that broadcast – my father, Morley Safer, joined the program when I was eight months old and retired 46 years later – I am acutely aware of the costs of that devotion. 60 Minutes, particularly in its early days, demanded commitments of time and travel that were keenly felt at home.

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Over the years, I’d ask my dad if his occasional sharp criticism of the CBS brass or its sponsors was wise. His usual response was: “What are they going to do? Fire me?” This week we learned that under CBS’s current regime, the answer would be yes. While organizing his papers after his death in 2016, I found copies of letters that if written today would likely threaten his job. “You have ruined this company,” he wrote to Larry Tisch in 1990, a couple of years after Tisch famously slashed the news division’s budget and fired hundreds of staffers in the name of cost-cutting.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/05/cbs-bari-weiss-morley-safer?CMP=us_bsky&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Bluesky#Echobox=1740769161-1