Why the top producer at ‘60 Minutes’ says he can’t do the job anymore

“60 Minutes” is the gold standard in broadcast journalism. The iconic show has been around for 57 years and has remained not just relevant, but a leader in the world of elite journalism.

Part of the reason for its legendary status and stellar reputation is top producer Bill Owens, who has been running the program since 2019 and is just the third executive producer in the show’s history. He has been with “60 Minutes” for 24 years.

But on Tuesday, he dropped a stunner.

Saying he can no longer run the show the way he used to and the way he wants to, Owens announced he was walking away.

In a memo to staff, Owens wrote, “Over the past months, it has also 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.

“60 Minutes” has continued to produce important and newsworthy episodes, but it has been entangled in corporate conflicts and legal threats from President Donald Trump that have, at times, received more attention than the terrific work it broadcasts.

Trump is suing CBS (and parent company Paramount) for $20 billion, claiming that the network deceptively edited a “60 Minutes” interview last October with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris in an effort to help her win the 2024 election.

The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum wrote, “Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case …”

Owens reportedly previously said any settlement with Trump would not include an apology from him.

The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Battaglio wrote, “Owens’ departure could be a sign that a settlement is forthcoming.”

In his Status media newsletter, Oliver Darcy reported that Owens addressed the staff and, visibly emotional, told them, “It’s clear that I’ve become the problem. I am the corporation’s problem.”

Darcy wrote that Owens was under “sustained corporate pressure” and was doing his best to protect the program.

Owens told staff, “I do think this will be a moment for the corporation to take a hard look at itself and its relationship with us.”

Owens’ claim that he could no longer run the show the way he wants to is a stunning allegation. In his memo, he went out of his way to say that Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, has “always had our back.” Put those statements together and one has to wonder if Owens’ frustration is with the corporate ownership and, ultimately, about how the show can cover the current administration.

But just last week, Trump raged on his Truth Social about two stories “60 Minutes” did — one about Greenland and another about the war in Ukraine. Trump wrote, in part, “They are not a ‘News Show,’ but a dishonest Political Operative simply disguised as ‘News,’ and must be responsible for what they have done, and are doing. They should lose their license! Hopefully, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as headed by its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”

The show continues to have excellent ratings, drawing an average of nearly 7.5 million viewers this past season.

In a separate memo to staff, McMahon said CBS remains committed to “60 Minutes.” As far as Owens, McMahon said, “Standing behind what he stood for was an easy decision for me, and I never took for granted that he did the same for me.”

No word on who might replace Owens, but he hinted that the next executive producer would come from the “60 Minutes” family. He wrote that McMahon “agrees that 60 Minutes needs to be run by a 60 Minutes producer.” He also wrote, “The show is too important to the country, it has to continue, just not with me as the Executive Producer.”

Here is the full memo that Owens sent to staff:

The fact is that 60 Minutes has been my life. My son was 6 months old, my wife was pregnant with my daughter and my mother was in a coma when I spent 5 weeks on the battlefield in Iraq with Scott. My 60 Minutes priorities have always been clear. Maybe not smart, but clear.

Over the past months, it has also 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.

The show is too important to the country, it has to continue, just not with me as the Executive Producer. Please remember, people didn’t think we would survive without Mike or Ed or Don or Jeff. We did. You will.

60 Minutes will continue to cover the new administration, as we will report on future administrations. We will report from War zones, investigate injustices and educate our audience. In short, 60 Minutes will do what it has done for 57 years.

Wendy McMahon has always had our back, and she agrees that 60 Minutes needs to be run by a 60 Minute producer. Tanya has been an amazing partner, as have Claudia and Debbie, Matt Richman and Matt Polevoy. I am grateful to all of them.

Look, I have worked at CBS News for 37 years, more than half of that at 60 Minutes, I have been shot at and threatened with jail for protecting a source. I have overseen more than 600 stories as Executive Producer of 60. I know who I am and what I have done to cover the most important stories of our time under difficult conditions. I am also proud to have hired the next generation of correspondents and to call Lesley, Bill, Anderson, Sharyn, Jon, Cecilia and Scott friends. Scott one of my closest.

Thank you all, remain focused on the moment, our audience deserves it.

Bill

Federal judge orders Trump administration to rehire Voice of America staff

For this item, I turn it over to my Poynter colleague, Angela Fu.

A federal judge ordered the U.S. Agency for Global Media on Tuesday to restore the Voice of America employees it had put on leave and to release congressionally approved funds for Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Network.

The preliminary injunction, issued by Reagan-appointed U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, requires USAGM to restore all employees and contractors to their status prior to March 14, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order gutting the agency. After the executive order, more than 1,000 Voice of America staff were put on leave, and the 83-year-old broadcaster went silent for the first time in its history. USAGM further withheld grants Congress had approved for Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Network, which are independent nonprofits that rely on federal funding.

Those actions likely violated numerous federal laws, Lamberth wrote in a memo accompanying his order. Those laws include congressional appropriations acts and the International Broadcasting Act, which states that American international broadcasting shall “effectively reach a significant audience.” USAGM’s affiliated media outlets were created to provide reliable news to countries without a free press.

USAGM must restore Voice of America’s programming, Lamberth ordered. His ruling also requires monthly status reports from USAGM to prove that the agency is complying with his order and disbursing funds to Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

USAGM currently faces five lawsuits over its shuttering of affiliated media agencies. They include two lawsuits from Voice of America employees and one each from Radio Free Asia; Middle East Broadcasting Network; and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, another nonprofit that relies on grants from USAGM.

Lamberth denied Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s motion for a preliminary injunction because the outlet is in grant negotiations with USAGM.

Plaintiffs in the various lawsuits released statements Tuesday celebrating Lamberth’s ruling and calling on USAGM to comply as soon as possible. In addition to the 1,000 Voice of America staff who were put on leave, hundreds of journalists at Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Network have been furloughed. They include journalists with work visas who are at risk of deportation back to countries that are hostile to journalists, like China and Vietnam.

“We welcome the ruling that USAGM must continue to fund RFA, as Congress intended. It’s now up to the U.S. Agency for Global Media to release RFA’s Congressional funding,” Radio Free Asia president and CEO Bay Fang wrote in a statement Tuesday. “While we want to resume our operations as they were before, for that to happen we need to receive timely disbursement of our funding on a consistent basis. Until then RFA unfortunately remains in the same position as last month when we began to furlough our journalists and staff.”

Palin loses to Times … again

For the third time, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has lost her defamation suit against The New York Times. A Manhattan jury deliberated for about two hours Tuesday and ruled the Times was not liable for defamation over a 2017 editorial.

The editorial incorrectly linked the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords to a map circulated by Palin’s PAC that showed certain electoral districts under crosshairs. Within 12 hours, the Times admitted its error in a correction but said it was an “honest mistake.”

Still, Palin sued.

A judge in the 2022 trial rejected Palin’s claims while the jury was deliberating. The jury was allowed to render its verdict, and that, too, went against Palin.

So, at that point, she was zero for two.

But she was granted a new trial for technical reasons, including that the jury might have been swayed by the judge’s announcement that he would reject Palin’s claims.

After a weeklong trial this time around, the jury came to a swift decision, probably ending Palin’s claims once and for all. Although it’s possible she can appeal again.

Palin told reporters, “We haven’t talked about what we’ll do next legally.”

Washington Post strikes deal with OpenAI

For this item, I turn it over to my Poynter colleague, MediaWise director and faculty member Alex Mahadevan.

The Washington Post is the latest newsroom to sign a deal with OpenAI to boost visibility in ChatGPT.

“As part of this partnership, ChatGPT will display summaries, quotes, and links to original reporting from The Post in response to relevant questions,” according to a news release, “with clear attribution and direct links to full articles so people can explore topics in greater depth and context.”

I threw ChatGPT a softball to show how it works in practice, asking it about the leading story on the Post’s website: “What should I know about Marco Rubio’s latest moves at the State Department?” Indeed, the top link is from The Washington Post, with others from The Associated Press, The Guardian and Politico, which have similar licensing deals with OpenAI.

A ChatGPT search for information about Marco Rubio and the U.S. Department of State. (Screenshot)

But when I asked a broader question — “What’s the latest news coming out of the Trump administration?” — the Post fell to 20th on the source list. Reuters, which notably does not have a deal with OpenAI, was at the top.

The payoff for publishers in these deals is hard to quantify.

Multiple studies by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia found that ChatGPT’s search misattributed or misrepresented articles from various publications. And research last year showed that less than 2% of searches on OpenAI models were for anything news-related.

OpenAI, on the other hand, gets access to a deep well of original content it can use to train future models that power its chatbot. Since the terms of the deal are undisclosed, like most similar partnerships, we don’t know how much the AI company is paying the Post or how long the deal is in place.

The Post joins more than 20 other newsrooms that have inked similar agreements with AI companies. Meanwhile, The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI is still working its way through the legal system.

Hegseth drama continues

Embattled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth continues to face allegations of irresponsibility and incompetence for the texting of American attack plans, so he went to a safe place to tell his story: Fox News. For Hegseth, a former Fox News host, it was like going home to family.

In an unsurprisingly soft interview on “Fox & Friends,” Hegseth blamed leakers for reports that he shared detailed information about strikes in Yemen on March 15 before they happened in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. The New York Times first reported the story.

Hegseth blamed leakers, telling the show, “Once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker. I don’t have time for leakers. I don’t have time for the hoax press that peddles old stories from disgruntled employees.”

Hegseth has not denied the Times report, but said he did not share any classified information — a claim the Times did not make in its story.

Hegseth told “Fox & Friends,” “What was shared over Signal — then and now — however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations, for media coordination and other things.”

Hegseth has also talked about leakers helping the “hoax press.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, “The secretary of defense is doing a tremendous job. He is bringing monumental change to the Pentagon, and there is a lot of people in this city who reject monumental change, and I think frankly that’s why we’ve seen a smear campaign against the secretary of defense since the moment that President Trump announced his nomination.”

Appearing on CNN on Monday, Mediaite founder and longtime ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams said it’s a “little bit troubling” that Hegseth keeps pointing the finger at others, including the press, for his mistakes. And this was before Hegseth repeated such claims on Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends.”

Abrams said Monday, “Hegseth himself isn’t saying this was a mess-up, but we’re going to make sure it never happens again. And instead he’s saying, ‘Oh, the media, they’re just trying to get us again.’ It’s like, well, wait a second. Yes, that’s true, but it’s also true that you did something that you should be expressing some level of regret for, and you should be promising the American people it won’t happen again.”

Brilliantly biting

 

HBO host Bill Maher recently had dinner with President Donald Trump, and told viewers of his show that the Trump he met is not the same Trump that the public sees. Maher called Trump “gracious” and “measured.”

Comedian and writer Larry David responded with a scathing and brilliantly funny satirical piece in The New York Times called, get this, “My Dinner with Adolf.” David, known for his HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and being the co-creator of “Seinfeld,” never mentioned Maher or Trump in his guest essay, but it was obvious what he was doing.

David wrote it as if it were 1939 and he was invited to have dinner with Adolf Hitler. In the piece, David portrays his dinner host in glowing fashion. Clearly mocking Maher, David wrote, “Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I'd seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”

New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy wrote a piece to accompany David’s essay: “Larry David Imagines a Private Dinner With Hitler.”

Healy wrote that David reached out to the Times about writing something, but Healy wrote, “Times Opinion has a high bar for satire — our mission is geared toward idea-driven, fact-based arguments — and we have a really, really high bar for commenting on today’s world by invoking Hitler. As a general rule, we seek to avoid Nazi references unless that is the literal subject matter; callbacks to history can be offensive, imprecise or in terrible taste when you are leveraging genocidal dictators to make a point.”

Healy wrote that David was not equating Trump to Hitler, adding, “It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”

Healy continued, “Sometimes the best way to make an opinion argument isn’t in a traditional essay. Americans are inundated with news; it can sometimes take a satirical provocation to break through, even at the risk of causing offense.”

In the end, it seems pretty clear that David’s essay was directed at Maher (and others who are easily charmed by Trump) rather than Trump. And his takedown of Maher was hilarious and brutal.

Media tidbits

• The Minnesota Star Tribune has named Kathleen Hennessey its next editor and senior vice president. Hennessey comes from The New York Times, where she spent the past three years as a deputy politics editor. Hennessey is a native of St. Paul. She replaces Suki Dardarian, who retired in February. She will start next month.
• Insightful story from Politico’s Ian Ward (with great photographs from Francis Chung): “Meet the 8 MAGA Outlets Disrupting the White House Briefing Room.”
• Vanity Fair’s Natalie Korach with “Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich Says Trump’s Attacks Don’t ‘Keep Me Up at Night.’”
• Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy with “How news outlets may benefit from a ruling that Google’s ad tech violates antitrust law.”
• Mike Patrick, who called games on ESPN for 36 years, has died. He was 80. Here’s more from ESPN.

Hot type

• For The New York Times Magazine, Amanda Hess with “My Son Has a Rare Syndrome. So I Turned to the Internet.”

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Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected].