Is it Time for 60 Minutes to Shutdown?

Is it time for CBS to pull the plug on 60 Minutes?

That's what the website Gawker says they should do. 

After highlighting some of the news mags missteps over the past few weeks, which include Lara Logan's Benghazi report, the Amazon commercial and the puff piece on the NSA, it might be time.

Gawker writes 60 Minutes is a strange show in today’s media market. It’s the most-watched show in the history of television, yet is subsidized almost entirely by advertising aimed at retirees. And despite its archive of high-profile snafus, it enjoys a permanent Important Organ of Journalism status. It’s an even stranger show within the confines of CBS, where 60 Minutes producers have long operated out of their own special silo, away from the rest of CBS News. They even have their own Midtown studio, across the street from the news division’s headquarters.

Creating a massive broadcast success out of a tiny bubble is a high-wire act, though, and 60 Minutes keeps on tumbling down. That’s one reason Dylan Davies managed to trick the show’s producers: They never bothered to ask their CBS News colleagues with better government intelligence sources to vet his story. 

60 Minutes has produced fantastic journalism, won hundreds of well-deserved awards, and otherwise worked very hard to create a space for serious journalism in a medium that rewards maximum vapidness. But those accomplishments can only be described in the past tense. Nothing is forever. It’s time to tear it down and build something new.

Ouch!