60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens announced he was leaving the celebrated CBS newsmagazine as the network is locked facing down President Donald Trump $20 billion defamation lawsuit over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview.
Ownes, 58, became the show’s executive producer in February 2019, eventually adding oversight of CBS Evening News to his repertoire last year. But he said on Tuesday he was forced to leave after he felt CBS executives were trying to interfere on how he ran the show.
“Over the past months, it has also become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it,” he wrote. “To make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
Owens did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The abrupt resignation marked the end of Owens’ 37-year career at the network, where he ultimately found himself the face of internal resistance against a president eager to punish his media enemies.
Owens took over the program in February 2019 after former executive producer Jeff Fager left in 2018 over accusations he didn’t address harassment at the network. That made Owens only the third top producer in the show’s 57-year history, which began with creator Don Hewitt in 1968. (Hewitt also settled a case in the 1990s after a woman accused him of sexual assault and ruining her career, which CBS continued to pay until at least 2018.)
During his six-year tenure as executive producer, Owens oversaw interviews with figures like Trump, former President Joe Biden, Pope Francis, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But his biggest challenge came last year after 60 Minutes ran its interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump and his MAGA minions seized on a moment from the Harris sit-down that aired Sunday morning Oct. 6 on Face the Nation. When that same section appeared on a special Monday night edition of 60 Minutes the following day—the same episode that Trump backed out of at the last minute—her answer the same question about Israel was edited differently.
Trump claimed the program “illegally” edited the answer to make Harris look better. He filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the network last year, amending in to $20 billion in February.
CBS and Owens have denied the claim, saying they acted within journalistic standards. While the network has fought the lawsuit in court, its parent company Paramount Global has sought to settle the case in part to get government approval for its merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. And Trump’s FCC chair chair Brendan Carr has made no secret of the fact that he would consider the CBS suit in any decision around the merger.
But Owens has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the show’s part, maintaining its editing decisions were in line with journalistic ethics.
“There have been reports in the media about a settlement and/or apology,” Owens told staff in February, according to the Times. “The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done.”
Still, Owens appeared to have found his position at the network untenable as the case continued. “Having defended this show—and what we stand for—from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he told staff on Tuesday.
An Oyster Bay, New York, native who now lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children, Owens joined CBS News in 1988 as a summer intern, working the Democratic and Republican National Conventions that year, according to his CBS News biography.
He worked in a variety of roles including field producer and assignment editor before moving to the White House, where he eventually became CBS’ senior White House producer. It was there where he and correspondent Scott Pelley began working together, and the two have remained close.
Owens held a stint as CBS Evening News’ senior broadcast producer before joining 60 Minutes as a senior broadcast producer in 2007. He also helped launch its sports-focused 60 Minutes Sports on Showtime and the show’s digital arm 60 Minutes Overtime. Under his tenure, 60 Minutes won several Emmy Awards, and Owens has been repeatedly nominated for the Producers Guild of America award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television.
“Bill’s DNA is in hard news,” 60 Minutes stalwart Lesley Stahl told Variety in 2020. “He is definitely bringing that sensibility overall and to each individual piece.”
In quitting, Owens appeared to be eager to avoid the same mistakes that 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt made 30 years earlier.
CBS infamously axed a Mike Wallace-led story in 1995 featuring a tobacco company whistleblower who revealed the company had brushed aside evidence that smoking was dangerous. The network was, coincidentally, also in the process of getting sold, this time to Westinghouse, and it wanted to avoid potentially billions of dollars in liability over any fallout.
Hewitt killed the piece following pressure from CBS’ lawyers and the saga inspired the 1999 Oscar-nominated film The Insider. Hewitt wrote in his 2001 memoir Tell Me a Story that he regretted killing the segment, but he said he had no other choice.
“We could quit, of course,” he wrote. “But I had spent too much of my life making 60 Minutes what it was.”
Owens clearly thought otherwise. And his farewell note is unambiguous about how he felt over the Trump episode and his tenure at 60 Minutes.
“I have overseen more than 600 stories as Executive Producer of 60,“ he wrote. ”I know who I am and what I have done to cover the most important stories of our time under difficult conditions.”
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