Bari’s New ‘60’ Slate

On Tuesday afternoon, I received an urgent tip on the encrypted-messaging app Signal: Ross Douthat, the conservative opinion columnist at The New York Times, was set to leave the newspaper and join “60 Minutes.” Initially, I was skeptical. Douthat has no background as a reporter, let alone as an investigative journalist suited for television journalism’s most prestigious program. In fact, he has virtually no television experience at all. Would CBS News boss Bari Weiss and newly installed “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Nick Bilton really put him on the program?

Sure enough, they would. After confirming the tip with a couple additional sources, we were first to report that Douthat was leaving his plum gig at The Times for a role on the venerable newsmagazine. A memo from Bilton soon followed, lauding Douthat as “one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today” and describing him as a “thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy.”

In addition to announcing Douthat as a correspondent, Bilton also revealed a slate of new “60 Minutes” contributors: Sebastian Junger, the author and former ABC News special correspondent; Gianna Toboni, the former Vice correspondent and CNN journalist; and Trevor Phillips, the CBS News senior global affairs correspondent who has faced allegations of Islamophobia. Bilton also announced that Norah O’Donnell will officially join the program as a full-fledged correspondent, months after we reported that she was set to take on a larger role at the show.