CBS’ esteemed but battered “60 Minutes” scored an Emmy nomination yesterday for its 2024 interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The nod carried some irony as it fell under the category of Best Edited Interview for a segment whose editing stoked the wrath of, and eventual $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News by, President Donald Trump.
The Emmy acknowledgement came a day after executives from CBS and Paramount, its parent company, reportedly met to discuss terms of a settlement with Trump said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. All of this followed the resignation last week of “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Bill Owens, a veteran of the show who in 2019 became just its third leader in 56 years.
In a leaked audio of his shocking farewell, a choked up Owens said it had “become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.” Proceeding comments by star anchor Leslie Stahl and others made clear that Owens’ exit was not a voluntary or amicable one. Anchor Scott Pelley raised eyebrows when he communicated the same message in a highly unusual on-air rebuke of management on Sunday’s “60 Minutes.”
The Owens announcement quickly monopolized the attention of media spectators, with the New Republic’s Parker Molloy calling it “a five-alarm fire for press freedom in America” and the Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan lamenting the “one-two punch” of “60 Minutes” losing its editorial freedom and its large audience of 6 million-plus per week losing trust in the program’s journalism, which along with PBS’s Frontline has for decades been seen as the gold standard of US broadcast news.
The immediate source of the problem is political. Trump, in a suit that most legal experts have called bogus, claimed that CBS’s editing of the Harris interview at the height of the 2024 campaign was purposefully misleading in a manner that defamed him.
This came at a time of widespread consternation about a White House interfering with press freedoms, including a total overhaul of briefing standards and access that appear very much intended to undermine the Associated Press.
Then there was the curdled promise of billionaire owners saving prominent American newspapers. During the final stretch of the ‘24 campaign that model cratered the reputations of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, which by decree of oligarch owners chummy with Trump endured a series of disconcerting editorial changes.
Earlier today, the White House issued an executive order “ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media” outlets NPR and PBS. Legal experts and Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcast, which distributes those funds, say the CPB’s non-profit status outside of the federal government shields it from such actions.
An equally alarming cause of the “60 Minutes” upheaval involves business. Paramount is eager for FCC approval of its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Paramount owner Shari Redstone has in recent months been exerting greater control over editorial content at “60 Minutes,” an unprecedented development at a program long known for its exceptional degree of independence from corporate overseers.
Further complicating matters was that Redstone’s overreach, which included creating a new role overseeing editorial standards, stemmed from her disagreement with the show’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza War, a topic that had riven media outlets across the country.
Finally, Owens’s exit amid curtailed independence coincided with a closely-watched showdown between the Trump administration and Harvard over the university’s handling of antisemitic campus protests, an accusation tethered to the more nebulous assertion of conformist woke ideology undercutting the ideals of US higher education.
This autocratic assertion of control over varied institutions that help shape American intellectual life all came just before the second Trump administration turned 100 days old. Harvard is fighting back, but the profound challenges facing CBS News and other media companies are different since, unlike wealthy private universities, they’ve long been under the control of sprawling non-broadcast commercial entities on a relentless drive toward consolidation.
Podcasters, exiled journalists turning to Substack and independent news networks like the fast-growing, progressive Meidas Touch have prospered as audiences on the left and right frustrated with the state of legacy media seek alternatives.
But how can those relatively barebones operations hope to win battles against the White House or FCC if a giant like “60 Minutes” can’t? How could they hope to build up remotely comparable news gathering resources? The lack of those resources will likely lead to an even bigger share of news content focused on opinion. Opinion has its place. But it’s no substitute for the sort of hard news “60 Minutes” produced so well for so long. And these days it’s too often skewed by bitter and intractable partisanship.
In his goodbye, Owens told colleagues to continue fighting the good fight. “People have asked, should we walk out? No. The opposite,” he said. “I really, really, really believe that this will create a moment where the corporation will have to think about the way we operate, the way we’ve always operated, and allow us to operate like that.”
It’s heartening to see “60 Minutes” reporters like Pelley and Bill Whitaker speak up, on air and under fire. A Pew survey last month found that 70% of all Americans are concerned about eroding press freedoms. The press owes it to the public to confirm that those fears are justified.
