The resignation of the executive producer of one of the most venerated news shows in the United States marks yet another notch in MAGA’s tightening belt.
It won’t be the last, with President Trump on the warpath and media conglomerates cowering to avoid retribution. More ominously, it shows that these attempts to rule over corporate overlords by fear are working.
In a parting statement to staff, 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens lamented his diminishing ability—after nearly 40 years as an effective and beloved boss—to make independent news judgments about what airs on the long-running show. Pointedly, he cited interference from network executives into practices that have apparently impeded its long-standing reputation for destination news reporting.
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In October 2024, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS alleging bias and claiming that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris had been deceptively edited to make her—his then-rival in the 2024 presidential election—appear “coherent and decisive.” (The crux of his complaint was that different edits of a quote Harris gave in the interview were used in different contexts.) Trump has since doubled that amount to $20 billion, adding his displeasure over recent reports about the war in Ukraine and his attempts to take over Greenland. CBS has sought to dismiss the suit as groundless, citing the First Amendment, but there are also efforts underway to settle.
Most legal analysts think that, if the case ever reached a courtroom, Trump wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. But that’s not the point. “It isn’t about an interview with Kamala Harris any more than the fight with Harvard is about antisemitism,” said Jonah Blank, a former senior editor with U.S. News. “It’s about asserting dominance.”
The current contretemps is also fueled by the potential sale of Paramount Global, which owns CBS, to Skydance Media, a $28 billion merger that would shake up the media landscape. The FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, has yet to sign off on the deal, which is more about the power and money at stake than any high-minded journalistic principles.
(Carr has opened an investigation into CBS and the selective editing of the 60 Minutes Harris interview. He’s also investigating ABC News for how it fact-checked in real time the Trump-Harris debate and NBC for whether it violated equal-time provisions by having Harris on Saturday Night Live doing the cold open just days before the election.)
“Bill Owens is showing us what we already knew, that Trump is successfully bullying the news media—and as long as media organizations are a small piece of larger conglomerates, we are going to see this happen again and again and again,” Blank added.
What’s happening at 60 Minutes has indeed already happened at ABC, when the network bowed and settled a multi-million-dollar suit with Trump after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely stated Trump had been convicted of rape. (The correct term is sexual abuse.)
Follow the money, and the dominoes fall. Take the once proud Washington Post, which brought down President Nixon for corrupt behavior; the paper led the charge to shift its editorial policies to conform to billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ concerns about free markets, rather than to stand on the side of those warning of the slide toward dictatorship—and that democracy dies in darkness.
“I have been made aware of interference in our news processes, and calling into question our judgment,” long-time 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl said in an interview with Variety. “That is not the way that companies that own news organizations should be acting.”
She hopes the meaning—and the impact—of Owens’ “sacrifice” reaches their bosses. “We have a reputation to uphold,” she told Variety. “It’s one of the reasons that CBS News is valuable. It’s what 60 Minutes stands for, and we can’t lose that,” Stahl continued. “We can’t afford to lose that.”
But so much has been lost already that it will take a long time to regain the public’s trust. Whatever happens next, 60 Minutes has joined a long and growing list of Trump capitulators. There is no end to Trump’s real and imagined grievances, and now that he has the power to redress past and present wounds to his ego, there’s more to come.
He can’t let anything go. Neither can those he’s squaring up against.
