The Daily Reid: A 60 Minutes warning

The departure of the head of CBS' long-running news magazine is a very bad sign

I used to work at CBS. It wasn’t a permanent gig. I took the job during my year off from Harvard after a miserable freshman year in which I decisively determined that I could no longer be a pre-med. I hated medicine as a “writ large” profession after my mom died of metastatic breast cancer at age 57. (At the time she died, 22 days before I started Harvard, I thought she was 47, which made it even worse. Philomena was blessed to look young enough to “Hollywood” her age…)

Taking a year off after freshman year meant moving back to East Flatbush, Brooklyn, to my Auntie Dolly’s house. And because there was no way I could explain leaving Harvard to a family full of Caribbean immigrants, I jumped immediately into working full-time.

After temping as a secretary for months through a number of the temp agencies that existed in New York at the time, the first “real job” I landed was at CBS, in the Standards and Practices department. My job in Standards was assisting the censors — yes they called themselves that — in processing the program episodes and other content sent to us for review from every department, from entertainment to news. My job was to fill out the form handed to me by my boss, Jane Ann McGettrick — who over the course of some 30 years rose from secretary like me, to department vice president, by dint of her relentlessness, meticulousness, and a little luck, given that she was a woman working in an almost all-male world. After filling out the form, I would package the tapes and send them back their various departments via internal mail.

The job wasn’t exactly scintillating, but I amused myself by challenging and timing myself on how quickly I could turn the packages around, and also by reading the sometimes hilarious notes sent by the censors to the various departments on how they could get their scripts in alignment with the policies and standards of the CBS corporation.

There was occasional adventure in the building nicknamed “Black Rock,” on 52nd Street and Avenue of the Americas (AKA 6th Avenue). Most of it came from the fact that we shared the building with Columbia Records (fun fact: CBS is an anagram for Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.) My claim to fame at the time was riding the elevator once with George Michael in 1988. He must have been in town for a concert on his Faith tour.

As you might expect, he was absolutely gorgeous, with thick hair and perfect teeth and tanned skin. And he was very polite and nice, and smelled amazing. I had a huge crush on George Michael in high school, as I assume just about ever other Black girl at Montbello Junior and Senior High School did, since we had zero idea that he wasn’t riding our proverbial bus. All we knew was “Careless Whisper” was IT. On the elevator, I dared to say “good morning,” to which Mr. Michael replied, “good morning” and smiled; so basically I assumed at that point we were married. Another time I got on the elevator with Michael Bolton, who I was shocked was so much shorter than I was.

Sometimes during lunch breaks, I would walk the four long avenue blocks (New York street blocks are short, while avenue blocks are hella long) from Black Rock to the West 57th Street building, where they filmed the CBS nightly news and 60 Minutes. Having grown up in a Walter Cronkite - Dan Rather - 60 Minutes household, it was a pure fan girl move, though I never actually ran into Mr. Rather, who I later got to meet, interview and be interviewed by, when I was working for MSNBC. (Yes, I properly fangirled..)

Ms. Megettrick wasn’t what you’d call a kind woman, but she did give good advice, including making me assure her that I would go back to Harvard, which in fact I always planned to do. In between, though, I quit CBS for Columbia Pictures/Tri-Star, where I worked for an equally colorful woman in the PR department, including on Leonard, Part 6, a trash film starring the not-yet-known-to-be-villainous Bill Cosby, and other disastrous creations. The most interesting person I rode on the elevator with in the Coca-Cola Building on Fifth Avenue, where Columbia/Tristar was headquartered, was Dustin Hoffman, the year he co-starred with Warren Beatty in the absolutely shit film Ishtar. I don’t think he would mind my saying that, given that the movie narrowly lost the 1988 Razzy for worst film of the year to … Leonard, Part 6.

Side note, the Coca Cola building was down the street from a relatively new, gaudy building on Fifth Avenue belonging to a failed real estate developer from Queens. I remember walking into Trump Tower when it was still brand new, on one of my lunch breaks, and thinking it was the tackiest, gold-gilded thing I had ever seen.

The guy literally hasn’t changed at all, other than probably adding a diaper…

But I digress…

Needless to say, I went back to Harvard in the fall of 1988 and switched my major to film (what Harvard calls “Visual and Environmental Studies” to make it sound snootier.) One of the classes I took in my new, non-premed department was a theater course, which a very nice man named Ira Rosen was auditing. Ira happened to be a senior producer at CBS, for 60 Minutes. (He later wrote a book about his time at 60 Minutes and his long career in journalism.) Ira was my favorite person in the class, and not just because of my 60 Minutes fandom. He was just a fun guy to be around. But I really loved talking with him about 60 Minutes. That show was a part of my life history. My mom and I never missed an episode; not one Sunday when I was growing up. It was the kind of long form journalism and in-depth storytelling that made me fall in love with news, just as surely as ABC’s Nightline kept my curious brain buzzing, and at the time when it was less fluffy, NBC’s Today Show took me around the world, including to my father’s country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, back when Bryant Gumbel was the host. I was rarely late to school the day the Congo series aired on Today.

I say all of this to say, the death of 60 Minutes would personally break my heart. More importantly, it would also damage our already brittle democracy. And so Donald Trump’s war on 60 Minutes and CBS matters not just to me, but to all of us. And CBS bending the knee is Columbia University-level bad.

From The New York Times:

CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said that he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.

In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has 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.”

“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.

A representative for Paramount declined to comment.

So who is behind Mr. Owens exit? Apparently, it’s Shari Redstone, daughter of the late Sumner Redstone, the former boss of CBS.

Mr. Redstone was the 1944 Harvard grad billionaire investor who took control of media giant Viacom in a hostile takeover in 1987, giving his company control of everything from MTV Networks to BET, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Showtime, The Movie Channel, publisher Simon & Schuster and more.

Viacom’s parent company used to be CBS, but the feds made them spin it off in the 1970s when the Nixon era FCC ruled that television networks couldn’t syndicate their own programming to themselves. Mr. Redstone also acquired Paramount, giving him ownership of such franchises as Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mission: Impossible, and Titanic. For a while, he even owned Blockbuster Entertainment. Mr. Redstone eventually got CBS back, as well, when under the Bill Clinton FCC, the rules were massaged to allow companies to own multiple stations in the same market, leading the way to Paramount and CBS merging.

When CBS and Viacom split, Mr. Redstone remained chairman of both companies, and he appointed Les Moonves to run CBS. It was Mr. Moonves who was in charge when Dan Rather filed a lawsuit against CBS for declining to renew his lucrative contract after his truthful story about George W. Bush’s draft-dodging got waylaid by a falsified document that unfortunately took attention away from the facts. Rather’s report aired on a weeknight show called 60 Minutes II.

Once old Mr. Redstone was incapacitated at age 76 — two years younger than Donald Trump — Shari took over. And she has been focused on her goals. Here’s how the ouster reportedly went down, per Status News, which obtained audio recording of the meeting in question:

Late Tuesday morning, chatter started spreading through the halls of CBS News. A one o’clock meeting had suddenly been scheduled for the “60 Minutes” staff. It was short notice and there was no stated agenda. Alarm bells started to ring. By early afternoon, as producers and correspondents filed into a room on the 14th floor of the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side, the tension was unmistakable.

Anderson Cooper appeared on Zoom from Rome, where he’s covering the death of Pope Francis. Inside the room was CBS News boss Wendy McMahon, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, and the rest of the show’s top-tier staff—many of whom had spent decades working with Bill Owens. He stood at the front, visibly emotional, and delivered the news himself: after 37 years at CBS News, and six leading "60 Minutes" as executive producer, he would be stepping down in the coming weeks. “So an email is going to go out now that says I’m leaving,” he said, adding, “It’s clear that I’ve become the problem. I am the corporation’s problem.”

Owens, of course, wasn’t simply announcing a retirement. He was sending a message: "60 Minutes" is under sustained corporate pressure and he was doing what he thought was best to protect the storied newsmagazine's reputation. Fighting back tears, he described a breaking point between the show’s editorial independence and corporate control. “I do think this will be a moment for the corporation to take a hard look at itself and its relationship with us,” he told the room.

“People have asked, should we walk out? No. The opposite," Owens 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.”

And this additional background, from Semafor:

Paramount owner Shari Redstone in recent days sought to know which upcoming 60 Minutes stories were about President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the situation — triggering a series of events that ended with the Tuesday resignation of the show’s longtime producer.

Producer Bill Owens resigned abruptly this week, complaining that he no longer had the editorial independence to run the iconic Sunday evening news show.

In a note first shared with The New York Times, Owens said that “over the past months, it has 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.”

“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote.

His resignation was the culmination of months of tensions between 60 Minutes and Paramount, which has taken greater interest in oversight of CBS News.

Following Trump’s demand that the FCC inflict “punishment” on CBS over a recent 60 Minutes piece on Greenland and Ukraine, Paramount executives, including Redstone, asked the program to provide a list of upcoming Trump-related pieces it was reporting on for the duration of its season, which ends in May.

A spokesperson for Redstone denied that she saw or sought to see 60 Minutes pieces, and emphasized to Semafor that Redstone and Paramount were not seeking to kill stories. But one person familiar with the situation noted that Redstone had both publicly and privately criticized 60 Minutes in recent months, a trend that resulted in Paramount’s decision in January to appoint Susan Zirinsky, the former CBS head, to oversee its standards.

A fourth source who spoke with Owens in recent days said the former producer had grown concerned that CBS’ corporate parent was becoming too interested in 60 Minutes — and that was making him uncomfortable. Owens also did not enjoy the additional scrutiny from Zirinsky, who since January had been reviewing sensitive stories as part of a push for stricter standards within CBS that was supported by Paramount.

Owens’ resignation comes as Paramount is hoping to close its merger with the entertainment company Skydance, which continues to be under review by federal regulators. Last year, the Trump campaign sued CBS over what it said was deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. While CBS has stood by its reporting and editing, Paramount has sought to settle the lawsuit, reportedly choosing a mediator to oversee the talks.

Apparently, Ms. Redstones … interest … is not being welcomed by the actual journalists at 60 Minutes. From Variety:

The departure of the top producer of “60 Minutes” on Tuesday marked a concerted effort by the staff of the venerable newsmagazine to send a message to one of the show’s most important viewers: its ultimate boss.

Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS News, has taken increasing interest in “60 Minutes” in recent months, according to six people familiar with the matter. She did so as she attempts to navigate a sale of the company known for owning CBS and the Paramount movie studio to Skydance Media, controlled by entrepreneur David Ellison. The sale will be life-changing for Paramount, which has lagged behind its contemporaries as audiences migrate away from once-powerful cable networks like MTV and TV Land, and it will help Redstone maintain her family’s fortune.

“60 Minutes” has made that transaction more complex. An interview between correspondent Bill Whitaker and former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, presented on CBS in the days leading into the 2024 election, has become fodder for what many experts believe is a meritless suit by President Donald Trump against CBS. At issue: Trump allegations, filed in federal court in the Northern District of Texas in November, that “60 Minutes” tried to mislead voters by airing two different edits of remarks made in the interview with Harris, then Trump’s rival for the White House. CBS has sought to have the case thrown out. Since that time, however, the Federal Communications Commission has opened an investigation into the matter and CBS and Trump attorneys have engaged a mediator.

Little wonder, or so Paramount executives would tell you, that a new layer of editorial supervision was put in place at CBS News. In January, Susan Zirinsky, a veteran producer and former CBS News president, was named “interim executive editor” and assigned to oversee standards, and help to vet stories and journalistic practices. The new role was created after a series of controversies tied to CBS News coverage across shows including “60 Minutes” and “CBS Mornings.”

But the structure proved alarming to people who put “60 Minutes” together each week. Bill Owens, only the third executive producer in the venerable program’s history, said Tuesday that he faced an increasing lack of ability “to make independent decisions based on what was right for ’60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.” In journalism circles, there are few things worse — particularly in an era when more mainstream news outlets have seen decisions made by business owners like Disney (ABC News) and Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post) that seem more concerned with sparking favorable relationships with current national leaders than with explaining the world to audiences without fear or favor.

Owens’ departure — along with various staff rumblings that have accompanied it — is seen as a smoke signal of sorts to Redstone, a cautionary note about what could happen to the program if it’s not allowed to continue in truly independent fashion. Other prominent personnel have also been vexed. “I have been made aware of interference in our news processes, and calling into question our judgment,” correspondent Lesley Stahl told Variety during an interview Tuesday. “That is not the way that companies that own news organizations should be acting.”

Such a microscope trained on “60 Minutes” has not only been unwelcome, but also unheard of. The show has enjoyed an unprecedented level of autonomy in its nearly six decades on air, and while it has long screened its stories for legal scrutiny and adherence to journalism standards, it has been allowed to police itself. Suddenly, producers were asked to incorporate someone else into its process. In this case, Al Oritz, a former CBS News senior producer and head of news standards and practices, was helping to vet stories, according to three of the people familiar with the matter. Ortiz had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Owens in the past, these people indicate, but his new presence left show producers feeling they had what one person calls “a plant” in their midst whose role was to feed information to senior Paramount executives and Redstone.

The question for “60 Minutes,” for CBS and for its parent company, is whether they will put the emphasis on the traditional art of news gathering and storytelling, without fear or favor, or whether they will pull a Columbia, so to speak, and bend the knee to the regime in order to further their mergers and acquisitions business.

CBS isn’t the only media company facing that question.

And the impulse to be a Columbia or to be a Harvard … the late Mr. Redstone’s alma mater, in the face of a dodgy, peevish wannabe dictator and his demands to control the culture, academia, and the news, appears to be THE question for us all. Cue the Succession clip: