60 Minutes is in serious turmoil thanks to its executive producer, Bill Owens, quitting and publicly throwing a temper tantrum. What happened? Oh, buckle up.
On Tuesday, the EP of six years – but only the third ever to hold that post in nearly six decades – said he would be resigning from the Sunday news program, suggesting he felt the network was encroaching too much on his editorial calls. This could apparently not be tolerated at the show, which is entirely unbiased and uninfluenced by anything other than the facts, alright? You may not realize that, but it’s true. Just ask them.
Owens and others argue that the show has had total independence from network brass for the show’s 57 years on the air, and that suddenly that was changing. Under Don Hewitt, the creator and original EP, they said, ‘Hey, we had independence, and it worked out pretty well.’ He was there for almost 40 years. Jeff Fager was there for the next 14 seasons, and it was less so. But under Owens, 60 Minutes has all but lost its mind shilling for progressives.
I, for one, am thrilled to see him go – not that I think this broadcast with its current staff is salvageable. I am in favor of dismantling this current version of the show, which would appropriately fit in any hour of MSNBC primetime.
Trump’s Lawsuit
The latest meltdown started when Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS and its parent company, Paramount, accusing 60 Minutes of unlawful and illegal behavior in what he said was deceptive editing of the Kamala Harris interview last fall.
You may recall they took her word salad answer about Benjamin Netanyahu and siphoned it down to make her sound more cogent. We caught it because they put out the wrong version of it when they were teasing the interview, and then they played a different version when she actually appeared.
Most legal analysts, including yours truly, do not see much of any merit in that lawsuit. But Trump has used it as a cudgel over Paramount, whose owner Shari Redstone is trying to sell the company right now to Skydance and that sale is going to need government approval.
Recent History
Trump has long complained about 60 Minutes being unfair to him and biased in favor of Democrats. On that, he is 100 percent correct. That was true under Jeff Fager, but especially under Bill Owens.
On Barack Obama
Before we get to Owens, let’s take a quick look back at the Fager years and how the show treated Barack Obama:
“You don’t have any doubts that you’re ready?” “Where do you get all this confidence?” “How are you finding the job?” “What’s the most frustrating part of the job?” “Do you take a day off?” “Do you see some hope? Do you think that things are going to get better?” “Do you think that you might have the unemployment rate down to 8 percent by the time the election rolls around?” “This is the most aggressive speech I’ve seen you given in a while. What changed?” “Why do you think you’d be a good president?”
Those hard-hitting questions all came courtesy of Steve Kroft. Not exactly murderers’ row like back in the Mike Wallace years, huh?
On Hunter Biden Laptop
And who could forget the absurdity under Bill Owens when Lesley Stahl interviewed Donald Trump in October 2020 – just before his re-election battle against Joe Biden – after the Hunter Biden laptop story had come out. Stahl repeatedly claimed the device “can’t be verified,” which Trump pushed back on.
We only know the exchange even took place because Trump taped it himself, not trusting 60 Minutes to air his full grievance. And indeed he was right, and he released it.
On The Lincoln Project
In the same time frame, October 2020, 60 Minutes took us inside The Lincoln Project’s campaign against Trump. Did they do a hard-hitting expose on the rabidly anti-Trump grifters who are loathed by virtually all Republicans and accomplish little more than successfully lining their own pockets? Let’s see:
STAHL: …These buccaneers have made a name for themselves with malicious attack ads, churning out new ones almost daily. Most released cost-free on social media. John Weaver feels it’s the party that’s betrayed him.
WEAVER: I mean, look Lesley, we’ve gone from caring about character, rule of law, defending the Constitution, a cogent national security policy, free trade. Where are those issues? Imagine if you travel the country for 30 years fighting for Republican principles, and you learned it was all a lie. No one cares about all the issues that we fought for.
STAHL: How painful is it for you to turn against the Republican Party? Do you ever sit around and talk about how you’re repudiating your life in a way?
How painful is it John Weaver, my little buccaneer? By the way, Google “John Weaver Lincoln Project” and see what other questions Lesley Stahl could have asked if 60 Minutes had actually done some investigative reporting about that group.
On Alleged Voter Fraud
After the 2020 election, the biggest story in the nation was, of course, Trump’s claims of voter fraud, especially in places like Pennsylvania, where Democrats made changes to voting procedures late in the process that were not approved by the state legislature. Those changes allowed ballots to arrive after Election Day to count, they allowed less secure ballot drop boxes, and more.
Did 60 Minutes take an in-depth, fair, and balanced look at that? Here’s Bill Whitaker:
“As COVID spiked again, vote by mail ballots flooded tabulation centers, other ballots jammed street side drop boxes or were hand delivered to registrars and city clerks. What could have been chaos, instead became an exercise in democracy…”
It was democracy in action. That’s all it was, folks! That case went all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And yes, it was not resolved in Trump’s favor. We know that. But it was just “an exercise in democracy” – there was no valid legal battle.
On Ron DeSantis
Joe Biden was sworn in as president in 2021, and did 60 Minutes spend the next four years digging into the president’s mental acuity with in-depth pieces? They asked a question or two along the way, but no. Or his opening of the southern border allowing more than 10 million illegals to flood the country? No. Or how about the COVID overreaches under that president? Absolutely not. It appears they had a different focus – a certain red state governor with presidential ambitions of his own.
Obviously fearing Ron DeSantis might become the eventual Republican nominee, 60 Minutes aired a disgustingly misleading report by Sharyn Alfonsi in April 2021 suggesting the governor was guilty of a pay-for-play campaign contribution scheme by which he offered the COVID vaccination shots at Publix supermarkets as some sort of payback to a grocery store chain that had donated to his campaign.
60 Minutes showed a bit of that brief exchange between Alfonsi and DeSantis in which he offered what looked like a rather lame response to her tough questions. They just so happened to leave on the editing room floor the bulk of his extremely substantive answer to every point she raised, in which he utterly dismantled her accusations. After they saw the piece, even some Florida Democrats lashed out saying they had told 60 Minutes the Publix story was “bullsh-t” but the producers did not seem to care.
On Climate Change
It wasn’t just political hits either. Take a look at the show’s coverage of, say, climate change. This one is from Scott Pelley in January 2023:
PELLEY: …In 1970 the planet’s three and a half billion people were sustainable, but on this New Year’s Day the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs… A World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years, the abundance of global wildlife has collapsed 69 percent mostly for the same reason.
GUEST 1: Too many people, too much consumption and growth mania.
GUEST 2: I would say it’s too much to say that we’re killing the planet because the planet is going to be fine. What we’re doing is we’re killing our way of life.
No mention of the number of nearly identical warnings just like this that had rained down upon the populace for decades prior to this report with not a scintilla of accuracy. None of the climate change doomsday predictions have come true. Somehow they forgot that in the piece.
On Free Speech
Or how about more recently on free speech in Germany, where people are literally being arrested for saying things deemed “offensive” online – a concept most normal Americans would detest. Not Sharyn Alfonsi, though. She appeared to love the idea. You can see our full analysis of that segment here.
On LGBTQ Curriculums
On Wednesday, we played Scott Pelley’s attempted take down of Moms for Liberty when they sat down with him last March. He said they had no basis for their assertions that LGBTQ books and other inappropriate material is intentionally being put in elementary schools.
So wrong were Moms for Liberty that all nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court just spent a day immersed in titles promoting LGBTQ material in elementary school classrooms, the very thing Scott Pelley said is not happening. And the only question from the court was not whether it does, in fact, occur, but rather why schools are refusing to allow parents to opt out.
Looking forward to your follow up and your apology, Scott Pelley.
Owens’ Resignation
So, this is what Bill Owens’ “independence” has gotten us – the absolute worst, most biased, hardest left version of 60 Minutes that we have ever been subjected to. And yet to hear him and his supporters tell it, Shari Redstone finally looking at the program and saying, ‘You need to reel it in, people’ (what she actually did was just appoint a producer to enforce the company’s “journalistic standards”) was the breach. This was the straw that broke the back of 60 Minutes at its core.
In a leaked goodbye 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…”
And lest you think I am being overly dramatic, he was reported to have spoken to the newsroom in tears. “A gut punch,” said a veteran 60 Minutes producer to The New York Times, which broke the story. “Profoundly disturbing, wrong.” And then there is this, as reported by Jake Tapper on CNN, who spoke with a 60 Minutes source reeling from the news that told him:
“Bill has widespread support at 60. He dedicated his life to CBS and the broadcast, and this was his last act of dedication to it. It’s like a guy who has been battling for months against an attack – unable to defend the broadcast from inappropriate corporate influence, he pulls the pin from his last grenade. He sacrificed himself hoping it might make our corporate overlords wake up and realize they risk destroying what makes 60 Minutes great. It’s clear now, in a quest to sell the company, Shari Redstone and others will bow to presidential pressure. 60 Minutes is one of the crown jewels of American broadcast journalism, and they have no problem crushing it in their race to make a deal and make themselves richer.”
Bill Owens is like a Medal of Honor recipient, you see. He is jumping on the grenade and sacrificing himself to save the totally independent and unbiased 60 Minutes from the evil Trump and his influence over Shari Redstone.
Saving 60 Minutes
Perhaps, friends at 60, the problem lies not with your corporate owner or your president, but with you. Maybe, just maybe, you have lost your way. Perhaps you have gone so far leftward in your programming that it has actually caused the corporate brass to finally notice.
Yes, it is happening in the context of a lawsuit and a merger, but you have gone so far it is actually endangering the sale of your parent company. Might this not be a time to reflect, revamp, recover some of that old magic that made the broadcast famous to begin with?
We will believe it when you fire literally every correspondent. You can start with Sharyn Alfonsi, but every correspondent on staff, along with all producers, need to go. Shred it down to the studs, and we will consider taking you seriously again.
Until then, goodbye, Bill. You will go the way of 60 Minutes ratings out the door into retirement never to be seen again.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,056 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.