Bill Owens’s shocking exit from 60 Minutes was akin to a soldier pulling the pin on their last grenade, according to current employees at the serial magazine show.
The chief producer stepped aside Tuesday after 24 years on the show amid network turmoil related to a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly alleged that 60 Minutes’ sit-down interview with Kamala Harris prior to Election Day had “defrauded” the American public.
“The lawsuit was baseless. He wouldn’t apologize, he wouldn’t bend,” one 60 Minutes source anonymously told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “He fought for the broadcast and for independent journalism and that cost him his job. It’s shameful.”
A second internal source said that Owens had “dedicated his life to CBS and the broadcast.”
“It’s like a guy who has been battling for months against an attack—unable to defend the broadcast from inappropriate corporate influence. He pulled the pin from his last grenade. He sacrificed himself hoping it might make our corporate overlords wake up and realize they risk destroying what makes 60 Minutes great,” the source said.
“It’s clear now, in a quest to sell the company, Shari Redstone and others will bow to presidential pressure,” the source told CNN, referring to the nonexecutive chairwoman of CBS’s parent company Paramount Global.
“60 Minutes is one of the crown jewels of American broadcast journalism, and they have no problem crushing it in their race to make a deal and make themselves richer,” the source continued.
Trump and his allies have claimed that CBS should lose its broadcasting license for what they view as selectively editing Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two of the network’s shows—60 Minutes and Face the Nation—cut and aired different portions of her answer on different days. But a Federal Communications Commission review of the segment found that Harris’s answers had not been sliced and diced together—instead, they had been trimmed from the former vice president’s extended 21-second response.
“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,” Owens wrote Tuesday in a memo to staff, obtained by The Washington Post. “To make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
Owens further wrote that he was departing so that the show—which he described as “my life”—could “move forward.”
The post How Trump Forced 60 Minutes Chief’s Shock Resignation appeared first on New Republic.
