60 Minutes is Losing Time

By Marvin Kalb

Like an old politician with authoritarian ambitions, President Donald Trump has been at war with CBS’s 60 Minutes for several months, determined to contain and ultimately control one of the best television news programs of all time. This week gave the appearance that this is a battle he’s winning.

Trump has, in essence, forced the resignation of Bill Owens, the admired and experienced executive producer. In doing so, he has also bulldozed the program’s once indomitable spirit of journalistic independence merely for the sake of placing himself in a position to benefit from a major corporate change of ownership that—at worst—could transform CBS into a cringing version of Fox. From their graves, Murrow, Cronkite, Sevareid, and many others must be turning away in painful disappointment.

Trump, who watches television with the avid devotion he otherwise only reserves for golf, loved 60 Minutes…until he hated 60 Minutes. This about-face occurred during the 2020 presidential campaign when, in a gruff, petulant huff, the then-candidate angrily stalked out of an interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl, unhappy about her persistent questioning. Then, during the 2024 campaign, when Trump was offered another opportunity to appear on 60 Minutes, he must have remembered his Stahl encounter and self-protectively declined.

On this occasion, there was another reason to say “No.” He’d watched his opponent’s appearance on the esteemed show and disliked the way Vice-President Kamala Harris’s answers about the Israel-Hamas war were edited and broadcast to the public. So, as he has done on repeated disputes with media that doesn’t treat him with the deference he receives on Fox and Friends, he decided to sue CBS for $10 billion for “unlawful and illegal behavior,” an absurd charge he was almost certain to lose in court—but a continuing nuisance and challenge to Owens and 60 Minutes nevertheless. With help, Trump raised his suit to $20 billion.

In addition, he began demanding that Owens apologize, and a shocked Owens refused to comply. Why would he? He had done nothing wrong. 60 Minutes had simply edited the Harris interview, as it had done with hundreds of other prominent figures: depending on his judgment, not obligated to seek anyone’s approval.

At roughly the same time, compounding Owens’ difficulties, Shari Redstone, the majority owner of Paramount (the parent corporation of CBS News), made her unhappiness about a different 60 Minutes piece about the Israel-Hamas war known to CBS management and Owens. Obviously, he did not appreciate her criticism, feeling for the first time that his editorial judgment was being questioned and his independence as a seasoned, competent, free-wheeling executive producer undermined.

“Bill was under increasing pressure to go puffy on Trump,” Stahl told me.

60 Minutes has celebrated 57 years of justifiable praise for its noted journalistic accomplishments. Owens and his top producers and correspondents felt they had proven their value to the network and nation, earned management’s trust, and were entitled to their continued freedom of operations without having to check their news judgment at management’s door (let alone the government’s). 60 Minutes began to feel it was losing minutes on its famous ticking clock, with the pressure building relentlessly on two fronts: Trump and Redstone.

On April 13, the boil burst, when 60 Minutes ran two stories that sent Trump into a thundercloud. One was an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, rarely a Trump favorite, in which the wartime president accused Trump negotiators of judging peace possibilities only from a Russian perspective. The other focused on Greenland, especially on Trump’s imperialistic yearning to seize control of the island “one way or the other.” Neither piece painted Trump in a favorable light, and before Sunday had rolled into Monday he’d erupted on social media, accusing the famous CBS broadcast of “fraudulent, beyond recognition, reporting” and urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strip CBS of its broadcast license—which, by law, it had no power to do. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before,” he exploded, “and they should pay a big price for this.”

However Owens’ value to CBS is measured, within a week he resigned, though he probably was fired, the likely result of a Redstone decision conveyed through a corporate intermediary. A close friend, correspondent Scott Pelley, hit the nail on the head: “This isn’t something Bill is doing of his own volition,” he stated. “There was no choice in any of this.” With tears, his voice choking up, Owens told an emotional meeting of his 60 Minutes staff, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”

It was done with him because he refused to comply with Trump’s demands. He refused to apologize, which would have suggested he had done something wrong with the way the Harris interview had been edited. He hadn’t.

For Trump, this twisted imbroglio may well end up as a twofer. He managed to remove Owens from his leadership position at 60 Minutes, and he may be on the edge of completing the consummation of a big corporate deal that would put CBS under the control of the Ellison family, which enjoys a very close political relationship with Trump. The background story is that, for a while, Redstone has been trying to sell her controlling interest in Paramount to David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the immensely wealthy owner of Oracle, a multinational computer technology company. So much money is involved, so complicated is the technology, the deal could not be finalized until the participants had the approval of the FCC, now under the control of Brendan Carr, one of Trump’s most loyal disciples. Knowing that Owens has been removed as a thorn in Trump’s plans, Carr can now be assumed to give his official blessing to the Redstone-Ellison negotiation, when it’s finally completed, making both even more wealthy than they already are.

Finally, there is one other sad but profoundly meaningful outcome. When the deal is all signed, sealed, and delivered, CBS News will become a small but helpful piece of the vast Ellison empire, no longer the news giant it was when William Paley was our guardian angel in 1957, when I first joined CBS. Under Ellison, CBS will purr like a Fox.

“So self-destructive,” mused Stahl about White House pressure on a program known for “our integrity, our honest reporting, our toughness, our independence. How foolish of these people to threaten all of that?”

Marvin Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, a former network diplomatic correspondent and author of the recently published “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.”

---