Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) was on 60 Minutes Sunday evening — a timely guest in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in his state — but you’d never know it from the program’s X feed. The weekly Sunday show has not tweeted since February. 60 Minutes’ sudden silence on Elon Musk’s social media platform was reported by Awful Announcing’s Sam Neumann, who noted “the most-watched newsmagazine in America, a show that’s been appointment television for 57 years — just stopped tweeting.”
The show’s official account last posted for its 1.2 million followers on February 19, sharing clips of interviews with Bob Dylan, Timothée Chalamet (who played Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown), and Harry Shifman, one of Chalamet’s high school drama teacher. But it does not seem to be anything related to Chalamet’s film or Dylan’s music that drove 60 Minutes off The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, wrote Neumann.
Instead, he wrote, it looks like it was a 60 Minutes story a few days earlier about USAID being defunded — a story that expressly commented on Musk’s role in ending the funding that supporters have credited with saving millions of lives and maintaining American soft power around the world world. “It was Musk who called USAID employees worms,” said host Scott Pelley in the clip below. “In a post, he gloated about feeding the agency into the ‘wood chipper.’ The world’s richest man cut off aid for the world’s poorest families. Musk spent nearly $250 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected.”
Shortly after the show posted a link to the story, Musk tweeted, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”
Musk’s tweeted attacks and the program’s quiet exit from his platform came amidst months of upheaval for 60 Minutes, including vociferous criticism by President Donald Trump and a lawsuit he filed complaining about how the program’s interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris was edited, friction over the merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, 60 Minutes’ longtime executive producer Bill Owens resigning in protest over the anticipated caving to Trump, other 60 Minutes reporters publicly lambasting their employer, a new executive producer in July, and Paramount agreeing to settle Trump’s lawsuit for $16 million — despite many legal experts viewing the president’s case as weak and unable to survive a First Amendment defense.
CBS News and other CBS programs continue to post on X, and 60 Minutes is still posting on numerous other social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok, as Neumann pointed out.
“When government officials can threaten to jail journalists for editorial decisions, and news organizations feel compelled to limit their distribution in response, that’s a democracy story, not just a media story,” wrote Neumann, and “it says a great deal about the modern political and media environment” that 60 Minutes’ exodus from Musk’s X went so long without being noticed.
“What’s clear is that we’re looking at a situation where a major news organization stopped using a significant distribution platform immediately after its owner called for their imprisonment,” Neumann concluded. “The timing alone makes this worth going further under the hood, even if we might already know the answer.”
Mediaite reached out to CBS for comment but did not receive a response.
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