Bill Owens is reflecting on his decision to depart 60 Minutes last year and how his opposition to Trump’s meddling in the media led to dead-end meetings for potential jobs. “When I left 60 Minutes, all of the streamers wanted to talk to me and I had all the meetings,” Owens said at the inaugural Jupiter Festival Miami this week, per Variety. “Every meeting was the same. At the end they’re like, ‘Hey, we really appreciate what you did, et cetera, et cetera, but we could never work with you.'” Owens said that he suspected the reason those people weren’t interested in him was “because they had already paid their tribute to Trump.”
Perhaps Owens jumped ship from CBS News at a good time. The executive producer announced his departure in a staff memo in April 2025, after nearly 37 years, saying he wasn’t “allowed to run the show as I have always run it” or make independent decisions. His exit came as Trump sued CBS and its parent company, Paramount, for $20 billion over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that ran ahead of the election. Trump alleged that the network edited Harris’ answer about Israel to make her look more flattering—a lawsuit that many viewed as frivolous and baseless given the First Amendment. The FCC released the Harris interview transcript, and CBS News defended the edit as a matter of clarity and length, not political gain. Paramount ultimately settled the lawsuit for $16 million in July of that year. At the festival, Owens said that there was “interference” and editorial censorship, driven by higher-ups who didn’t want to rock the boat with any perceived negative coverage of Trump after he was elected. Wendy McMahon, the former president of the news division and CEO, made similar comments about the network’s journalistic integrity at Jupiter Festival. After Owens and McMahon resigned, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief in October of that year—and we all know how that’s been going.
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