’60 Minutes’ earns putrid audience against NFL playoffs, as intended

Just as the new leadership at CBS News intended, 60 Minutes captured a minuscule audience (by its lofty standards) up against an instant classic between the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears on NBC.

While we don’t yet have viewership figures for NBC’s Divisonal Round game on Sunday evening, the numbers are in for 60 Minutes on CBS, and they were not great. As Awful Announcing and numerous other outlets pointed out over the weekend, CBS News chose Sunday as the perfect opportunity to put an end to the bad press it had been receiving for weeks after new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss controversially shelved a 60 Minutes segment about deportations to the infamous El Salvadorian prison CECOT.

The storied news magazine was originally slated to air the story on Dec. 21, immediately following a Pittsburgh Steelers-Detroit Lions game that earned a record-setting audience for CBS. The network has traditionally used NFL Sundays as a lead-in for its best 60 Minutes segments, and intended to do so with the CECOT piece. CBS had promoted the story in the days prior to Dec. 21, only for Weiss to yank it at the last minute, later claiming that the segment lacked perspective from the Trump administration (who repeatedly declined comment for the piece).

That decision led to weeks of negative headlines about Weiss and her leadership at CBS News. Fast-forward to Sunday, and in similar fashion to how quickly Weiss pulled “Inside CECOT” from 60 Minutes on Dec. 21, the story was slotted into the Jan. 18 show. Only then, 60 Minutes was destined for a substantially diminished audience on account of airing directly against an NFL playoff game.

The Sunday-evening Divisional Round game is traditionally the fourth most-watched NFL game of the year, behind only the two conference championship games and the Super Bowl. When viewership for the game comes out later this week, it will likely be north of 50 million.

As expected, and intended, 60 Minutes suffered dearly from the competition. According to Jeremy Barr, a media reporter for The Guardian, Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes averaged just 4.9 million viewers, well below the show’s average of 8.32 million viewers during the 2024-25 season.

We expected ratings for Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” to be lower than usual, considering it was up against football on NBC, but it brought in a very low 4.9 million total viewers, according to Nielsen numbers.

The show averaged 8.32 million viewers in the 2024-2025 season.

— Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) January 21, 2026

In placing “Inside CECOT” where it did, Weiss and CBS minimized further embarrassment, especially when considering the story, which according to Weiss did not meet the editorial standards of 60 Minutes, did not change at all from its original form, sans a rerecorded intro and outro from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Rather than the segment being seen by the 10.35 million viewers that watched 60 Minutes on Dec. 21, it captured less than half of that audience.

Under Weiss’s leadership, it’s a wonder whether 60 Minutes will continue to bury stories that are critical of the Trump administration against popular programming on other networks. Is this a new strategy for CBS, or simply an attempt to put an end to an otherwise embarrassing misstep? Time will tell.