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.”
At the same time, CBS parent Paramount Global, run by Shari Redstone, is seeking approval for a merger with Skydance Media, founded by Larry Ellison. They are reportedly in mediation to settle the lawsuit with Trump, a prospect that has been bitterly opposed by Owens and others at “60 Minutes.”
I mean tbf people have been calling 60 minutes a legacy production of the bygone era of quality journalism for years now.
You’re half-right.
It’s real, researched, well-produced journalism which is definitely a relic of the past at this point.
I don’t think that’s what you were saying, though. Since your opinion hinges on what “people have been calling” it, I think you probably don’t watch it and believe that since it’s an old show and format, it must be inferior to… sound bites, inflammatory remarks, click/rage-bait, “X slammed Y,” etc.
And that’s sad.
Actually I did use to watch it quite often.
My point was not that it dropped in quality, it’s just that it became slow to keep up with ongoing events with details and information readily available via basic OSINT on primary sources or even regular quality news outlets.
Ex: https://youtu.be/dRRJmOTCqqQ
Pretty much everything presented in this report was already well known and available for months, making the the rest essentially a PR moneyshot for the US Navy.
I still watch it occasionally for its direct interviews with select people, but it’s still a legacy production that struggles to keep up with info you can get even from AP or Reuters.
Mind you it’s still miles better than flaming trash like Washington Post or NYT, but I could easily see CBS axeing it years ago.
It’s been in decay for a while, thanks to corporate and ultra-conservative ideological interests leaning on it. A lot more of the content has drifted towards anti-immigrant fearmongering, pro-war jingoism, and paleoconservative fixations on Big Government (in the form of social programs rather than police power) and public debt. The parade of hagiographies for the ultra-wealthy and the endless pumping of tech sector vaporware haven’t been great, either.
But enshittification has been strangling every major television news publication for a long while now. Owens isn’t exactly a radical. He made his bones giving Bush Jr an hour long platform in between 9/11 retrospectives on the eve of the 2002 election and then spent a big chunk of his career producing glossy sports media spreads for the benefit of some of the most shamelessly corrupt billionaires in the country. Since taking the “60 Minutes” producer’s desk, he’s bent over backwards to accommodate the studio’s biggest advertisers.
If the job is too miserable for him now, I have to assume it is because he is just answering angry phone call after angry phone call from a corporate advertising base that’s plunged right off the reactionary cliff.
I mean, they are also responsible for making news a for-profit enterprise, which has arguably ultimately killed it.