Screengrab via CBS/60 Minutes
Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens revealed executives at CBS parent company Paramount pressured him to apologize for the now-infamous Kamala Harris interview that prompted a lawsuit from President Donald Trump – a demand he says he flatly rejected before resigning.
In the lawsuit, Trump claimed that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited its 2024 interview with Harris, then his Democratic electoral rival. CBS aired two different parts of a response Harris gave to a question. One part of the response was in a teaser for the show, and the other was aired on the show itself.
Paramount Global, however, was seeking government approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance, and the network eventually settled with Trump for $16 million. Weeks later, the FCC approved the deal.
Speaking at Maine’s Colby College on Friday, where he received the Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism, Owens retold how executives demanded he “apologize.”
He continued: “I said, ‘I’m not apologizing for anything. We haven’t done anything wrong.’”
“I knew we were heading down a path that was ultimately going to be rocky,” he added.
Owens resigned in April, citing concerns about journalistic independence after Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, reportedly cracked down on 60 Minutes over a segment on the war in Gaza she considered too critical of Israel.
He told the audience in Maine that Redstone was again angered by a January segment on internal dissent within the State Department over Gaza policy and claimed he was pointedly asked: “You’re not gonna do another Gaza story, are you?”
Editorial decisions, according to Owens, became increasingly tied to the high-stakes Skydance merger.
He said the message conveyed to him was: “‘You’ll be the person that if this doesn’t go through, you should know you’ll be a big part of this.’”
Reflecting on his exit, Owens said: “The only thing I could do was professionally blow myself up to create a blast radius around CBS to get people’s attention that this was happening.”
The post Ex-60 Minutes Producer Reveals Blunt Reply to Bosses’ Demand After Kamala Harris Interview first appeared on Mediaite.
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