New Yorker's Ariel Levy Joins 60 Minutes as Contributor Amid Ongoing Overhaul
Ariel Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is joining CBS's 60 Minutes as a contributor, executive producer Nick Bilton told staff on Monday. Levy is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, a book examining raunch culture, and adds a long-form magazine pedigree to a broadcast news roster in the middle of a major rebuild. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Her arrival comes as 60 Minutes has been four correspondents down. Anderson Cooper exited earlier in the year. Over the summer, Cecilia Vega, Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley were terminated as Bari Weiss sought to overhaul the show under Bilton's leadership. That is a lot of chairs to refill on television's longest-running primetime news magazine.
Levy joins a roster that already includes several recent additions. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat will serve as a correspondent. Author Sebastian Junger, Vice News veteran Gianna Toboni and Trevor Phillips will work as contributors. Phillips also joined CBS News as senior global affairs correspondent. The show's existing correspondents — Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl and Jon Wertheim — remain in place. (The Hollywood Reporter)
For viewers, Levy's hiring signals the kind of contributor who can carry a reported essay onto the screen rather than a straight news read. Her New Yorker work has ranged widely — memoir, cultural criticism, international reporting — and the contributor role at 60 Minutes typically means producing segments rather than anchoring a desk. How many stories she files, and on what subjects, has not been detailed.
The broader picture is a programme restocking its bench after a season of departures that stripped away nearly half its on-air reporting corps. Each name arriving is also a name being measured against the ones who left. What the new lineup does for ratings, and whether the overhaul Bilton and Weiss have engineered steadies the broadcast, is a question only the next season's numbers will answer.
