CBS News is closing in on a new 60 Minutes lineup, with Seth Doane and Jim Axelrod under consideration as the program tries to refill seats left open by Scott Pelley, Sharon Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega and Anderson Cooper. Trevor Phillips is expected to have a role, Major Garrett is set for a contributor job and Matt Gutman is under strong consideration, according to people familiar with the matter.
The timing matters because the 2026-27 season premiere is only two months away, and the network is trying to settle the roster before the fall rollout. On a show built around a small number of signature correspondents, every change lands quickly with viewers and with the people inside the newsroom who have watched the upheaval drag on since the start of the year.
Pelley is the most visible symbol of that shake-up. He was fired last month after confronting management over the May 28 dismissals of Alfonsi and Vega, along with Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich, a dispute that later fed the broader row around Bari Weiss’s arrival as editor in chief in October. In February, Cooper chose not to sign a new deal as a 60 Minutes contributor, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family, though he has also told colleagues he does not want to work for Weiss.
The rebuilding is happening even as 60 Minutes remained the most watched news program on television in its 57th season, averaging 9.1 million viewers a week and growing 9% from the prior year. That makes the personnel churn more than a housekeeping exercise. CBS News is trying to preserve a winning brand while reworking the faces that carry it, and the closer it gets to the premiere, the narrower the room for delay becomes.
Not every role has been pinned down. Doane and Axelrod are both in the mix for unspecified jobs, Williams and Mariana van Zeller are still being considered, and O'Donnell will continue as a senior correspondent while occasionally anchoring specials. But the outline is clear enough: CBS News is moving toward a reset, and the remaining question is not whether the lineup changes again, but which names are attached to which seats when it does.
