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.”
can’t wait to see which former faux news producer gets the gig.
Sounds like maybe we should be more interested to see what Bill Owens does next.
Well, HBO has Oliver, Apple had Stewart, so I’d wager with a Disney/ABC streaming news show, unless they have one.
Apple lost Stewart because they didn’t allow him to even talk about China.
Yeah, I knew as soon as he signed up it wouldn’t last. Apple is not known as a bastion of free will. Everything they do is a walled garden.
Pete Hegseth is going to be needing a job soon.
can’t wait for all the sweet puff pieces with conservatives.
You used the word right (an ordinarily would be a wonderful pun), but just in case, I want to point out that “faux” is provided “foe” and not “fox”.
Challenges to the citizenship birthright, bypassing due process and courts, deporting legal residents, putting them in a famously brutal concentration camp, and now taking more news media companies captive under the accusation that they’re the “lying press.” Yep, totally normal.
I mean tbf people have been calling 60 minutes a legacy production of the bygone era of quality journalism for years now.
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.
