Lesley Stahl says 60 Minutes staff discussed quitting en masse after Bill Owens resigned

It’s heavy stuff, as Stahl says Owens (and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon, who also resigned) served as vital “barriers” to keep Paramount (and, specifically, Shari Redstone) from tampering with the show’s work. Gently pushed by interviewer David Remnick to define where her own line would be, Stahl notes that there were conversations about a mass resignation of 60 Minutes staff in the wake of Owens’ announcement—but that the veteran producer asked his (now former) staffers not to quit on his behalf. “He explicitly asked us not to resign.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Stahl is pragmatic about the fact that Paramount will almost certainly settle Trump’s lawsuit, which alleges that, by running an edited version of an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign, CBS News somehow harmed him to the tune of $20 billion. (Paramount, which desperately wants to get Trump’s approval to sell itself to Skydance, reportedly floated a $15 million price tag for a settlement, but got rejected this week.) “I’m already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” what that might mean for 60 Minutes, Stahl notes, while still trying to hold on to some optimism. “We will hopefully still be around, turning a new page and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” But that minor measure of sangfroid gets much more fraught when she questions whether the public even wants what 60 Minutes does anymore, suggesting that a blurring line between opinion and journalism, all tossed in the same “salad bowl” under the word “media,” has now fatally poisoned public perception against the press. “The pain in my heart is that the public does not appreciate the importance of a free and strong and tough press in our democracy. That we have a function to fulfil. The public doesn’t seem to want what we do to be part of our public life.”

So, uh, yeah: Happy Friday, folks!

[via Deadline]