An award-winning former reporter for 60 Minutes has called the flagship CBS show a toxic “snake pit” where you could be stabbed in the back at any minute.
Steve Kroft, 80, who spent 30 years working on 60 Minutes before leaving in 2019, also said he does not recognize the 2026 incarnation of the show under CBS’s new MAGA-curious regime.
Kroft, who won three Peabody Awards for his investigative work on 60 Minutes, made his shock revelations about the TV news institution on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast.
When O’Reilly asked Kroft if he’d repeat the role on 60 Minutes if offered, he admitted, “No, I probably wouldn’t do it again… I hated it.”
Kroft said becoming the London correspondent for CBS in 1984 was “the best job I ever had,” and while working for 60 Minutes was “appealing,” it soon became all-consuming.
“The job is just 24 hours a day. I mean, you may get a couple of hours of bad sleep,” Kroft said.
The reporter admitted he discovered the CBS newsroom was full of jealousy after he scored the prize role.
“You realize after a while, that not everybody was happy that I got this job. There were other people that wanted it,” Kroft said. “And so then you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies. And that’s, it’s just, you know, it is a snake pit.”
He added it was a paranoid environment, where staff “think that somebody is behind them, going to put a shiv in their back.”
In 2015, Kroft admitted to a three-year extra-marital affair with New York City lawyer Lisan Goines. “I had an extramarital affair that was a serious lapse of personal judgment and extremely hurtful to my wife and family, and for that I have nothing but regret,” Kroft said in a statement to the New York Post at the time.
Messages sent by Kroft during his fling were published by the National Enquirer, including one in which he said he “would rather be eating your pudding.”
He said he and his wife, non-fiction author and journalist Jennet Conant, were “working hard to get past this.” They remain married.
O’Reilly, who worked at CBS and ABC before joining Fox News, has also been the subject of a high-profile scandal. His 21-year career at the news network ended in 2017 amid allegations of sexual harassment. He vehemently denied the allegations, decrying them as “unfounded,” before reaching a $32 million settlement six months later.
In their interview, he also asked Kroft if he had watched the current version of 60 Minutes and suggested, “Surely you know it isn’t what it used to be.”
Kroft replied, “Yeah, I don’t know what it is.”
He also asked for Kroft’s views on President Trump.
“I think that Trump’s problems are deeper than Iran and the war. And I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that he thinks he can do anything he wants,” Kroft said.
“I think my big problem with Trump, it feels to me, and this is 60 Minutes and CBS, I kind of feel like we’re in federal receivership and the trustees of this receivership are Trump, (Paramount Skydance CEO David) Ellison, and Bari Weiss, and they have said quite openly that they think that they need to adjust.”
Kroft previously told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show he believed Trump’s $16 million lawsuit with Paramount over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was a “shakedown.”
“Devastating is a good word,” Kroft said of his thoughts about the current mood at his former show. “I think there’s a lot of fear over there. Fear of losing their job, fear of what’s happening to the country, fear of losing the First Amendment, all of those things.”
Another veteran 60 Minutes journalist, Scott Pelley, lashed out at CBS’s previous owners for settling over Trump’s lawsuit.
Appearing at the National Press Foundation’s annual journalism awards last month, Pelley said, “Our previous owners at CBS faced political pressure and crumbled‚” according to The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr.
Bari Weiss, CBS’s MAGA-curious editor-in-chief, has already indicated she is ready to overhaul 60 Minutes, which has lagged in the ratings since she took over at the network.
“Bari wants to make the show harder,” a source told The New York Post last week. “No one is talking about 60 Minutes on Monday morning.”
Weiss has already pulled one 60 Minutes episode off the air hours before broadcast over a lack of input from the Trump administration. The shelving of another segment reportedly led the show’s most high-profile correspondent, Anderson Cooper, to decline to renew his contract with CBS.
“She wants to put her stamp on 60 Minutes, and how you do that is you either get rid of the top producer or the top correspondent,” the source told the Post.
