“The Future of the Country’s No. 1 News Program Is at Stake”: The Clock Is Ticking on 60 Minutes’ High-Stakes Bake-Off -

On Tuesday, November 13, 60 Minutes had a bit of good news to tout. The previous Sunday’s episode had landed at No. 5 on Nielsen’s top 10 for prime-time broadcast television, a bragging-rights ranking for the evening’s most-watched shows. Some 12.7 million people had tuned in for Steve Kroft’s report on a new challenge to Big Tech data collection, Bill Whitaker’s story on one of the world’s deepest gold mines, and a Sharyn Alfonsi segment about a pair of identical twins in the N.F.L. The show’s P.R. department dutifully sent out a press release noting that the episode marked 60 Minutes’ second consecutive week in the top 10, and the fifth time in seven weeks it had made the ranking.

That 60 Minutes cracked the top 10 is not much of a surprise—the more than 50-year-old newsmagazine has generally been a fixture there. (Its season-to-date ratings are actually down slightly year over year.) What’s notable is that its current winning streak is taking place under new management—the first season since the shocking September 12 ouster of longtime executive producer Jeff Fager, heir to 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt. Put another way, this is the first time in five decades that either Hewitt or Fager hasn’t been in charge.

Beneath the business-as-usual ratings is considerable turmoil and institutional agita, caused by two intertwined dramas, themselves aftershocks of the #MeToo Earthquake. One is the selection of Fager’s successor, which is seen as a bake-off between Fager’s erstwhile deputy, Bill Owens, who is running 60 Minutes for the time being, and Susan Zirinsky, the longtime senior executive producer of 48 Hours and the go-to producer for CBS’s breaking-news prime-time specials. The other is an investigation that’s been underway for several months by a pair of white-shoe law firms, which are probing everything from sexual misconduct allegations against disgraced former CBS C.E.O. Les Moonves to the workplace culture of 60 Minutes. Fager’s exit, after all, was part of a broader cultural reckoning and internal shake-up that resulted from Moonves’s #MeToo downfall. (Moonves has denied any wrongdoing.)

In the TV-news world, the appointment of a new executive producer for 60 Minutes would be a big deal under any circumstances. The show, which reportedly pulls in more than $100 million in advertising revenue every year, is a crown jewel in the Sunday-night lineup of CBS, which means it is vital to CBS Corporation as a whole. But there are various factors that make the latest succession all the more notable and complex. The handoff from Hewitt to Fager was a predictable and carefully orchestrated transfer of power to someone who had been groomed for the job. “This is different,” someone who knows the ins and outs of the show told me. “It was triggered by unforeseeable events, and there’s a power dynamic at play that was not the case the last time.” A knowledgeable CBS source similarly put it: “The future of the country’s no. 1 news program is at stake, and who wants to fuck that up?”

For the first time, someone outside of 60 Minutes could potentially take charge of 60 Minutes—no small thing for a show that is essentially its own media organization within CBS News, with a large and tight-knit team that treasures the autonomy and prestige it has historically enjoyed. Additionally, 60 Minutes is adapting to a new leadership hierarchy. Fager had reported directly to Moonves, which meant that 60 Minutes was outside the purview of CBS News President David Rhodes. Now, the new executive producer will report up to Rhodes, whose relationship with 60 Minutes has been distant, if not somewhat fraught. It was Rhodes who canned Fager, after it came to light that Fager had sent a threatening text message to a female CBS reporter. She was covering allegations, from Ronan Farrow’s recent New Yorker exposés, that Fager had been complicit in workplace harassment, and that he’d been touchy-feely at libatious company parties. (While Fager has vigorously denied these allegations, there is ample agreement inside 60 Minutes and CBS News that he shot himself in the foot by sending that text.)

Rhodes already has a lot on his plate, including the ratings challenges of CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News. Choosing a new leader for 60 Minutes will be among the biggest moves he’s made since becoming president of CBS News in 2011(his current contract is said to be up for renewal within the next few months), right up there with the removal of 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley as Evening News anchor, and Pelley’s replacement by Jeff Glor; the addition of John Dickerson to CBS This Morning after Charlie Rose was fired following a sexual misconduct investigation by The Washington Post; and the creation of the streaming network CBSN.

Given the extent to which 60 Minutes has been entangled in the top-line corporate chaos at CBS, the executive-producer appointment is seen as something that will invite close scrutiny at the highest levels of the company, including from acting C.E.O. Joe Ianniello, vice chair Shari Redstone, and a fresh-faced board of directors whose first order of business has been to clean up the Moonves mess. Perhaps that’s why many within CBS presume the decision is already a foregone conclusion. “Everyone feels like it’s gonna be Zirinsky,” one source told me. The thinking is that Zirinsky is a time-tested leader, and installing her would send a signal that CBS is serious about changing the status quo. Several people inside 60 Minutes told me Zirinsky has a strong contingent of support there. But others believe the odds are still 50-50, given that Owens already has deep experience with the program and has been running it smoothly in the interim. (During a recent chat among some board members, according to someone familiar with the conversation, the interim transition was apparently described as “seamless.”)

Owens, who has been with 60 Minutes since 2003 and with CBS since 1988, represents continuity. 60 Minutes, which operates separately from the news division and is housed in its own headquarters across the street from the CBS Broadcast Center, is a fiercely independent and idiosyncratic operation. Owens, of course, has his own set of supporters. Sources told me that Pelley’s remarks about Owens during an acceptance speech last month at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, where 60 Minutes was up for 24 nominations, was seen as a ringing endorsement on behalf of the Owens camp. “All of the stories that 60 Minutes is nominated for tonight were shepherded onto the air by our executive editor Bill Owens,” Pelley said. “Last night was the beginning of our 51st season, and if I may say so, it was a hell of a premiere. And Bill Owens produced that as well.” Additionally, after the New York Post reported on October 19 that Zirinsky had emerged as the front-runner, the tabloid published a second story days later, in which sources dished that “top correspondents,” unnamed, had called members of the CBS board pressuring them to pick Owens. The obvious caveat? Owens getting the job could be viewed as bad optics on the part of management. In other words, would elevating Fager’s No. 2, regardless of his qualifications, be the message that they want to send? Is it time for a real change?

Zirinsky, on the other hand, would be a fresh set of eyes—an outsider who could nonetheless bring to the job more than four decades of experience in the trenches of CBS News. Zirinsky is legendary and beloved within the network, having jump-started her career in its Watergate-era Washington bureau. Before moving to the crime-focused 48 Hours in 1996, she spent years covering the White House, political campaigns, and international conflicts like the first Persian Gulf War and Tiananmen Square. Zirinsky has relationships within 60 Minutes—she and Lesley Stahl are close, for instance, and she is friendly with Owens himself. Some journalists at 60 Minutes, despite Zirinsky’s impressive résumé, can’t get past the fact that 48 Hours is such a different animal. There’s also an awareness that Zirinsky is known to be a very hands-on manager, whereas reporters and producers at 60 Minutes are accustomed to having their stories approved and then executing them with considerable independence, according to sources at the show. “There’s a continuity that people are afraid of losing,” said one 60 Minutes staffer. Someone who works with Zirinsky told me that just because she runs 48 Hours a particular way doesn’t mean that’s how she would run 60 Minutes: “She’s been here since ‘72. She knows and understands and respects the history of 60 Minutes—and the reverence for that program.”

Another question weighing on the minds of employees is whether Rhodes will seek to make any changes now that he has ownership of the show. People worry about things like budgets and staffing decisions. There’s also been some chatter about whether Rhodes would seek to do away with the July sabbatical that 60 Minutes staffers have long maintained. The show is structured like a scripted prime-time drama or comedy, with new episodes eight months out of the year and primarily repeats during the summer. July has traditionally been reserved as the one month where everyone could reliably take their time off to avoid scheduling conflicts. To outsiders, that may seem like a frivolous concern, but at 60 Minutes, it’s important.

As with the rest of CBS, 60 Minutes employees are eagerly awaiting the results of the #MeToo probe. In Farrow’s reporting for The New Yorker, 60 Minutes was portrayed as a hostile work environment ruled by powerful men with iron fists. That’s of course not the experience of everyone who works there, or who has worked there, but it’s a thread that the law firms conducting the probe are no doubt pursuing. People familiar with the investigation told me that many 60 Minutes staffers, including correspondents, had been interviewed by the attorneys, who have spoken to more than 350 people overall at this point. The lawyers have been combing through e-mails and attempting to corroborate anecdotes reported by Farrow—such as the one where a male senior producer “threatened to throw furniture at” a female senior producer, “and twisted her arm behind her back.” (Some female staffers have pushed back on the boys’ club perception by emphasizing the show’s women-heavy senior production ranks.) The widespread expectation is that the company won’t announce a new executive producer until the investigation is complete.

Will any additional allegations come to light? Will any aspects of the probe reflect poorly on Owens? How much longer will the whole thing take? These are all pertinent questions, and at 60 Minutes, the desire for answers is strong. “We just want it to be over with, so we know what the fuck’s going on,” one of the multiple staffers I spoke with told me. “I do think whatever is decided is gonna have a huge impact on 60 Minutes.”