# 60 Minutes ***60 Minutes*** premiered on September 24, 1968, created by [[Don Hewitt]] and Bill Leonard as a reporter-centred newsmagazine — the ticking stopwatch, three stories an hour, the correspondent as protagonist — and became the most-watched and most-honoured news program in American television. Its independence from the rest of [[CBS News]] was institutional: Hewitt ran it for thirty-six years and answered to almost no one, Jeff Fager for fourteen more, and [[Bill Owens]] from 2019. That independence is what made it the target. The program was the last piece of CBS News that management could not simply reassign, and the 2024–26 sequence is the story of how it was brought under control. ## The Harris interview and the suit In October 2024 the program aired a [[Kamala Harris]] interview in which a single answer on Gaza was edited differently for *Face the Nation* and for *60 Minutes*. On December 7, 2024 [[Donald Trump]] sued CBS and Paramount for $20B, calling it "news distortion" and election interference — a theory most media lawyers thought unwinnable. It did not need to be winnable. [[Shari Redstone]]'s sale of Paramount to Skydance needed FCC license transfers, and FCC chair [[Brendan Carr]] reopened a news-distortion complaint over the same edit. ## The unravelling - **April 22, 2025** — Owens resigns as executive producer: he "no longer had journalistic independence," citing Paramount's supervision of content as the merger neared. Correspondents read his memo on air. - **May 19, 2025** — CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon resigns. - **July 2, 2025** — Paramount settles for **$16M** to the [[Donald J. Trump Presidential Library]], no apology, plus a commitment to publish full transcripts of future presidential-candidate interviews. The FCC approves the merger within weeks ([[Skydance-Paramount]]). - **October 2025** — [[Bari Weiss]] becomes editor-in-chief of CBS News after Paramount buys [[The Free Press]]. - **December 21, 2025** — a completed Sharyn Alfonsi segment on El Salvador's CECOT prison and Trump-era deportations is pulled. - **2026** — executive producer Tanya Simon is replaced by [[Nick Bilton]]; Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega are fired; on **June 2, 2026** [[Scott Pelley]] is fired the day after telling Bilton at an all-staff meeting that Weiss was "murdering the show" — see [[Scott Pelley Firing]]. Five executive producers in fifty-eight years; three in eighteen months. ## Why it matters The program is the vault's clearest illustration of the [[Chilling Effect]] operating through ownership rather than law. Nothing was censored; a suit was settled, a merger approved, an editor changed, and the people who insisted on the old independence departed. Its history also supplies the counter-case: the 1995 Jeffrey Wigand tobacco story, which CBS's lawyers initially spiked with the Westinghouse sale pending — the pattern is older than Skydance, and the program survived it then because Hewitt and Mike Wallace fought it publicly. See [[Media Capture]] and the [[CBS Timeline]]. ## Herbert v. Lando (1973–1986) A February 4, 1973 segment, "The Selling of Col. Herbert," produced by Barry Lando and narrated by Mike Wallace, led to a libel suit by Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert. When Lando refused to answer questions about his editorial decisions, the case went to the Supreme Court, which held in 1979 that there is no First Amendment privilege shielding a newsroom's editorial process from discovery. Herbert eventually lost in 1986. See [[Herbert v. Lando]]. ## See Also - [[CBS News]] · [[CBS Timeline]] · [[Scott Pelley Firing]] - [[Don Hewitt]] · [[Bill Owens]] · [[Scott Pelley]] · [[Bari Weiss]] · [[Nick Bilton]] - [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[David Ellison]] · [[Shari Redstone]] · [[Brendan Carr]] - [[Media Capture]] · [[Chilling Effect]] · [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]]