Bari Weiss Downplays Reports of Weak ’60 Minutes’ Ratings Following Deportation Story Scandal

CBS News’ editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, is defending 60 Minutes amid reports of the show’s weak ratings.

Speaking at an industry conference on Wednesday, October 28, Weiss, 42, told the crowd the show was not her 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, per tech publication The Information.

Still, Weiss claimed the show, which she overhauled back in May, was doing “tremendously well.”

Since ousting 60 Minutes‘ executive producer, Tanya Simon, and parting ways with three of its top correspondents, including Scott Pelley, the show has struggled, failing to meet last year’s average viewership of 9.1 million viewers per episode, with Sunday’s spot only garnering 5.64 million viewers, Variety reported, calling it “one of the smallest audiences for the program in years.”

Despite garnering low viewership, the October 25 episode was particularly controversial for the network, following claims that 60 Minutes knowingly profiled a married Texas father of two who claimed to be gay on immigration documents to avoid being deported.

As Globe previously reported, the story came during the show’s segment on third-country deportations, in which an immigrant is deported to a country other than their own.

Following Sunday’s episode, the New York Post shared that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told them that Moussa Diawara, who was profiled in the piece, allegedly lied about his sexuality in his asylum application, and had informed CBS News of the matter two weeks before the segment aired on the network.

Diawara, 57, who immigrated to the U.S. when he was 32, reportedly claimed to be gay in 2012 immigration documents to avoid deportation to his native Mali over fears of discrimination, though 60 Minutes‘ report noted that he feared discrimination based on his religion, sharing that he had converted to Christianity and was worried about being persecuted should he return to the Muslim-majority country.

The episode was met with backlash from viewers after the revelation, which came from DHS General Counsel James Percival, who took to X after appearing in Sunday’s episode to share that he pulled Diawara’s immigration file and discovered his false claim, stressing just how “bad the immigration fraud problem is.”

The statements made on his application were not included in 60 Minutes’ segment; instead, Diawara, who was deported to Ghana, alleged that authorities in a West African country forced him onto a flight to Mali within days of his arrival.

According to the 60 Minutes piece, Diawara has since fled Mali and is living in an undisclosed country. Neither the show nor CBS News has addressed the backlash to the report.