My creative friends do tend to get their danders up whenever I’m guilty of passing judgement on something before I’ve seen even a snippet of production. I’ve been guilty of reacting prematurely to press releases, sizzle reels and proofs of concept that to me came off as overly aspirational and/or filled with more than the expected amount of bullsh-t one would otherwise expect. Anything to gain a competitive advantage, I suppose. In the immortal words of Norm Peterson, it’s a dog eat dog world out there and often I feel like I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear.
So I’m reserving an extra helping of eye-rolling disdain for the literally hundreds of online whiners that clogged up my social media feeds yesterday with their respective declarations that they were never, ever, ever going to watch 60 MINUTES again in the wake of what DEADLINE’s Tom Tapp reported early yesterday:
More changes for 60 Minutes in the Bari Weiss era. This time, some big names are joining the newsmagazine as correspondents and contributors, bolstering its ranks after the departures of Scott Pelley, Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
Ross Douthat is joining as a correspondent. As one of the resident conservatives at The New York Times‘ Opinion section, Douthat may help “widen the aperture,” as Weiss put it, “to reflect more of the political friction that animates our national conversation.”…Executive Producer Nick Bilton, who posted the announcement online, also touted the arrival of Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger as a contributor. Bilton calls the author a “generational talent.” Certainly, Junger is a master of longform storytelling in print. Bilton cites Junger’s work covering the war in Afghanistan for ABC News, as well as his time embedded with U.S. combat infantry for what became the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary Restrepo…Additionally, Gianna Toboni, a News Emmy-winning former senior correspondent at Vice News, is now a 60 Minutes contributor.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES’ Stephen Battaglio added a few more names to the list of newbies and incumbents:
Trevor Phillips, 72, a British journalist who joined CBS News earlier this year as a senior global affairs correspondent. He also worked in British politics…Veteran correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, Norah O’Donnell and Jon Wertheim are also returning to the program, which begins its 58th season on Sept. 13.
Several internal names are still being considered for full-time and contributor roles on the program. They include “CBS Sunday Morning” veteran Seth Doane, national correspondent Matt Guttman and foreign correspondent Holly Phillips. “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Doukopil is also expected be a contributor.
I’ll confess that I’m not all that familiar with Junger, Toboni and Trevor Phillips, though their CVs are at least a bit more filled with respected and recognizable train stops that the Barium Enema and her chief cook and bottle washer Bilton, whose appointment drove veteran correspondent and former Evening News anchor Scott Pelley over the edge and ultimately out the door. But as an uber-loyal subscriber to New York Times Audio, I am quite familiar with Douthat–and apparently so too is Tapp:
The words “opinion columnist” and 60 Minutes have rarely mixed over the years, except when they were accompanied by the name Andy Rooney. How Douthat’s talents mix with the newsmagazine’s legacy of hard, fact-focused journalism remains to to be seen. The 46-year-old Douthat is a skilled interviewer. His recent podcast conversations have included the likes of Vice President J.D. Vance and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. He’s not afraid to challenge, say, a billionaire conservative like Peter Thiel on his views about religion and the antichrist. But Douthat, like the other two new arrivals, does not have the traditional 60 Minutes-level TV resume. Weiss, in her pitch to staffers on the broadcast’s new direction, said in January: “Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television. If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”
Douthat is hardly as cuddly or as curmudgoenly as was the beloved Rooney, who despite his deep roots in war reporting eventually evolved into what is often misremembered as comic relief that inspired a whole bunch of comedians to imitate his “Didya ever notice” whine when he was contributing observations that mirrored the sort of humor that Jerry Seinfeld was building his career on. I always looked forward to Rooney’s segments, mostly because they tended to air in the last few minutes of the program, meaning that my sitcom lineup was about to start. But Rooney was hardly without his own controversies and prejudices, as this lengthy list of faux pas from his Wikipedia entry confirms.
These days I look forward to Douthat’s weekly INTERESTING TIMES video podcast on the same feed that fuels my mornings with the likes of POPCAST, HARD FORK, MODERN LOVE and of course THE DAILY. Sure, he’s opinionated and unafraid to share them. So too is Ezra Klein, who contributes his own more leftist slant twice a week to that impressive portfolio. More often than not I tend to side with Klein’s viewpoints, but Douthat offers his takes with equal professionalism and receipts. It’s both of their jobs to be provocative and they both typically accomplish that goal with flying colors in my ever-curious mind.
As I’ve previously mused, 60 MINUTES may indeed be an instituiton to those who came of age with it but these days draws more attention and traction from the forces that surround it–and that often includes the NFL Sunday afternoon doubleheader games that directly lead into it every other week. And the one point that I will concede that Ms. Weiss is indeed spot on with is the need to bring new eyes and ears into her tent. The trend line and demographic skew for the program even before she arrived on the scene was anything but advertiser-friendly. Bringing on a substantially younger contributor to one of the few successful extensions of feudal journalism this century from a brand as auspiced as THE NEW YOKR TIMES is to me both defendable and necessary.
I admit I’m more bullish on Douthat than others because I know his work intimately. If you’re not, I’d urge you to at least sample some of them. One is about to drop later this morning that if you ask nicely I’ll be happy to gift you. If you’re still disgusted by him after giving a listen and still want to insist that you’re permanetly divorcing from CBS or at least 60 MINUTES, I’ll at least allow you to hold onto that thought–though statistics strongly suggest your likelihood of eventual recidivism is high. You would have least given him the courtesy of sampling, which far too many of us are all too often incapable of.
I’ll be applying a similar mindset to the other new voices come September, and I’ll be eager to see what kind of stories and how frequently the remaining survivors of the previous regime are being assigned and utilized. Maybe I won’t stick around; I often don’t especially in football season. But at least I’ll be doing so from an informed perspective and actual experience. I hope some of you might be equally capable of at least that. Especially those who wear regular underwear.
Until next time…