Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, has resigned:
Top “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens abruptly resigned from the program on Tuesday, saying he no longer had sufficient independence to run the program how he wanted.
“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,” he wrote in a memo to staff…. “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.”
It is not clear how Owens was no longer permitted to run 60 Minutes “as I have always run it.” Perhaps the network wanted to impose normal editorial standards.
The back story here is President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for interfering in the 2024 presidential election by mis-editing an interview with Kamala Harris so as to prevent her from sounding incoherent, as she did in the original. While what CBS did was reprehensible, I don’t think Trump’s lawsuit states a claim. But perhaps another factor is at work:
CBS parent company Paramount Global is reportedly considering settling the suit ahead of a planned merger with Skydance Media in hopes of preventing potential retribution by Trump’s FCC, which has the authority to halt the multibillion-dollar transaction. Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, is reportedly in favor of settling with the president.
Maybe Redstone and others are embarrassed by the partisan dishonesty that CBS News exhibited with regard to the Harris interview, and that 60 Minutes has manifested for decades.
Remarkably, 60 Minutes has had only three Executive Producers in its long history. That could be part of the problem. 60 Minutes’ most notorious fraud was the George W. Bush Texas Air National Guard hoax, which we played a part in exposing during the 2004 presidential campaign.
But that was far from the only one. Earlier in 2004, we helped to expose another 60 Minutes scandal. As part of their attack on President Bush, they gave air time to Paul O’Neill and Ron Suskind, who breathlessly presented documents that they claimed came from the Pentagon. They claimed that these documents proved the Iraq invasion was planned prior to 9/11–an absurd assertion–and that Bush’s purpose was to seize Iraqi oil. The documents they relied on simply described Iraq’s oil resources.
It turned out that the documents promoted by 60 Minutes came from the Commerce Department, not the Pentagon, and they were pulled out of a series of totally innocuous records that described the oil resources of many countries around the world. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the Iraq war, or any other relevant topic.
That scandal got much less attention than Rathergate, probably because it didn’t occur during the heat of the presidential campaign. But the reality is that 60 Minutes’ history is mostly ignoble. It is good to see Bill Owens go; better yet would be if the program itself finally dies a long-deserved death.
