’60 Minutes’ chief Nick Bilton urges staff to stop making leaks — in memo that got leaked: report

“60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton reportedly gave staffers a stern talking-to about leaks – in a memo that itself got leaked – while incoming correspondent Sir Trevor Phillips warned that CBS News boss Bari Weiss might “crash and burn,” according to reports this week.

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Former tech journo Bilton, 49, has reportedly been openly griping about office politics as his tenure gets off to a bumpy start – and now he’s grown fed-up with the unrelenting leaks from network insiders.

On Saturday, he reportedly sent the storied newsmagazine’s staffers a 734-word missive urging them to come to him with any questions about newsroom rumors – effectively asking them to stop speaking to the media, instead.

“Since I started here there has been roughly a rumor a day,” Bilton griped in the memo, which was leaked to Status newsletter. “About me, about you, about what’s coming next – 95 percent of them are fabrications and blatantly incorrect.

“I no longer have the time or the patience for them, and I’d rather we spend that energy on the stories,” Bilton continued.

“If you hear something and it matters to you, come ask me and I’ll tell you what I know,” he added. “Otherwise I’d like this place to be talked about for what we put on television.”

Days later, Sir Trevor Phillips – one of the network’s newest hires, who will serve as senior global affairs correspondent for CBS News and an anchor on “60 Minutes” – gave a blunt assessment of Weiss, who took the helm at the network in October.

“Bari and her team have a huge tanker of a network news organization to turn around, and they are assembling a little team on the bridge,” Phillips told the Daily Telegraph. 

“The great thing about her is that she’s one of those people who will either change the world or crash and burn. But when they crash and burn, it’s in technicolor.” 

Phillips – who previously hosted a morning news show on Sky News and in 2022 was knighted for his human rights work – also said it would be a mistake to focus on Weiss as an “anti-woke” journalist, something she has often been called after speaking out against “woke” culture.

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“In the US, the controversy has been framed as, ‘CBS News is becoming anti-woke.’ But that’s not what Bari is about,” Phillips said.

“She has her own views, some of which I’m sympathetic to, some of which I’m not, but her point is that the media should be heterodox. There should be a variety of voices,” said the journo, who is slated to move across the pond this summer to start his new role at CBS in New York.

Phillips refused to comment on reports that Weiss had removed Holly Williams, a veteran reporter at the network’s London bureau, from a planned interview with Nigel Farage and given it to Phillips instead. 

He said interviews with politicians like Farage will be a part of his coverage.

It was a tumultuous season for the network over the past year, as many observers viewed Weiss’ hiring by Paramount boss David Ellison as an attempt to add more conservative voices to the network as it faced backlash from President Trump.

Then in early June, Bilton and Weiss fired longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley after he reportedly confronted Bilton during his first meeting with staffers, telling him he had “slender qualifications” for the job and that Weiss was “murdering” the show.

But in his memo sent over the weekend, Bilton appeared confident about the upcoming 59th season of “60 Minutes,” set to premiere Sept. 13.

“What’s already in the works is extraordinary,” he told staffers, adding that the team is “the best in the business” and should be “proud and excited.”

“For 58 seasons this show has come back in the fall and made people stop what they were doing to watch the greatest team in journalism hold power to account, take them somewhere they’ve never been before, and question people the way few others know how to,” Bilton wrote. 

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“It’s time to show them for the 59th time.”