60 Minutes Producer Quits After Trump FCC Harassment, Saying Show Can No Longer Do Independent Journalism

Last fall  Trump sued CBS claimed (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.

CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.

Carr has launched an “investigation” into CBS claiming that the minor edits to the Harris interview violate the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy, a rarely enforced rule preventing news outlets from killing stories or dramatically changing stories in exchange for bribes. It’s completely bogus, but whether CBS is guilty doesn’t matter; right wing media will ensure CBS looks guilty of being unfair to the right wing.

It’s a fake inquiry, designed to pressure CBS to fold to the whims of Trumpism and weaken their journalism of the administration. And it’s working. Top 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens now says he’s quitting the program, making it clear that CBS is likely to fold to Trump’s whims:

“Bill Owens, executive producer of television’s most popular and influential newsmagazine since 2019, said in a note to staff that it has “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.”

“The show is too important to the country,” he wrote. “It has to continue, just not with me as the executive producer.”

Owens might get chided for not standing up to Trumpism, but he’s facing a lose/lose scenario. Skydance owner and soon-to-be CBS boss David Ellison has been palling around with Trump at MMA fights. The company is also being pressured to fold like a coward (like Meta, ABC, or Paul Weiss) by Skydance exec and soon-to-be CBS boss Jeff Shell (booted from NBC after sexual harassment allegations). 

If current CBS brass actually cared about journalism, they’d cancel the Skydance merger and tell the Trump administration to go fuck themselves. But that would eliminate all the benefits such pointless “growth for growth’s sake” mergers deliver, such as brief stock bumps, tax breaks, and flimsy justifications for massive layoffs and outsized executive compensation.

So expect CBS journalism moving forward to only further coddle and normalize radical Trumpism. Which is amusing given that, like so many major U.S. media companies, CBS had already spent the last few years responding to authoritarianism by coddling the right wing. Which, if you hadn’t noticed by now, is the entire goal.