Former ’60 Minutes’ boss Bill Owens disdains CBS News’ overhaul of the show
The former executive producer of “60 Minutes” took a moment Monday night to warn about what’s happening to the long-running news magazine under its newest executive producer — and the people who currently run CBS News.
“CBS News and ’60 Minutes’ are institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be deployed,” said Bill Owens, who ended his time as head of ’60 Minutes’ after seeing new attempts by CBS News parent Paramount to interfere with the show. Owens made his comments at an awards ceremony held by the New York Press Club, and in the wake of efforts by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss to overhaul the program and install Nick Bilton, a former technology writer and documentary filmmaker, as the show’s newest leader.
To do this, Weiss and her team ousted Owens’ successor, Tanya Simon, and the show’s editor-in-chief, Draggan Mihailovich., along with correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. “The senior leadership of ’60 Minutes’ was fired all at once,” Owens said as he accepted the Gabe Pressman Truth to Power Award. “No reason was given.”
The decision to remake the show may not be easy to implement. On Tuesday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley excoriated Bilton and Weiss during a meeting of the news magazine’s staff. Pelley mocked any qualifications Weiss or Bilton had to run the show, and demanded an explanation as to why his colleagues were fired. And he accused Weiss of trying to “kill” the program.
“They were fired by people who don’t even know what we do, who don’t really care,” Owens said.
Owens said his former colleague was simply standing up for what was right, and may have even channeled “60 Minutes” correspondents like Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace and Morley Safer. “Scott can smell fraud from a mile away,” Owens explained, noting that Pelley thinks it is “disgraceful what happened.”
Weiss is a former opinion writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal who left the former after describing a place that was too sensitive to criticism leveled at it on social media. “Stories are chosen and told in ways that satisfy the smallest audience, rather than allowing a curious audience to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions,” she wrote at the time.
Since her departure, Weiss has founded and led The Free Press, an opinion publication that expresses “anti-woke” sentiment and has been labeled as more conservative in sentiment. It has proven popular with business leaders. Last year, she was appointed newsroom chief at CBS News by David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, which bought The Free Press for $150 million.
Weiss has also expressed strong pro-Israel views, and Owens claimed Monday night that her support of Israel had resulted in the departure of several CBS News staffers who felt they should not discuss all sides of the stories surrounding conflict in the Middle East.
When Ellison’s Paramount took over operations, Owens said, “my colleagues at ’60 Minutes’ were told to their faces that they could cover the news the way they always had. That didn’t happen.”
