60 Minutes Ratings Nosedive as Internal Dust-Up Grabs Headlines

60 Minutes 2026 Season

The latest episode of 60 Minutes came in as the lowest-rated of the season so far, according to final tallies from Nielsen Media Research.

Sunday’s episode, which included headline-grabbing segments from the West Bank and an interview with the director of the Secret Service, raked in 6.061 million total viewers and some 767,000 viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic.

Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl has allegedly considered quitting the flagship news program after a round of heated edits over her segment on Israeli settler harassment in the West Bank.

The segment also led to a tense meeting on Tuesday, during which protesting staffers were reportedly threatened with termination if they ever question the editorial hierarchy at CBS News.

The program performed below CBS’s Sunday night shows Tracker and Marshals, which air after 60 Minutes and both landed well above 7 million total viewers.

Sunday’s ratings dip comes a week after 60 Minutes scored an impressive 10.2 million total viewers and 2 million viewers in the demo on October 4, widely seen as a vindication of sorts for CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. Notably, that episode benefited from an NFL lead-in, unlike the most recent one.

This past Sunday’s program echoes some of the struggles the season kicked off with, as its debut was the lowest-rated since 2000. The September debut landed with 7.9 million total viewers, a 21% drop from the previous year’s debut episode and a significant decrease from years prior.

In October 2000, for example, the show premiered with a whopping 11.2 million total viewers — in what was a very different media environment for linear television.

Sunday’s episode, which is the season’s fourth, was also the lowest-rated fourth episode 60 Minutes has had since 2000, in both total viewers and the demo.

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