NOTE: As has become our custom since we launched this endeavor, we are devoting the last ten days of the year to reprising what we consider to the best of what we’ve mused about in the 355 preceding trips around the sun. But since we’re evolving and we pride ourselves on having a foundation steeped in the reality of actual numbers, as a new wrinkle we’re making our choices with an emphasis on which were outlier performers in terms of Instagram and Substack views.
Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, said Tuesday that he is resigning from the venerable CBS newsmagazine, telling staffers he had lost his ability to make independent decisions about the show.
“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 in a memo obtained by Deadline. “To make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience. So, having defended this show – and what we stand for – from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward.”
The tone taken by Owens internally was nothing short of fist-in-the-air protest, in lockstep with his team:
Owens met with staffers of 60 Minutes as his email went out. According to Status News, which obtained audio of the meeting, Owens told them, “I do think this will be a moment for the corporation to take a hard look at itself and its relationship with us.” The news of Owens’ departure comes amid anxiety in the news division, with consternation over a potential settlement that would be widely viewed as caving to Trump’s demands. At a recent Radio Television Digital News Association award ceremony in Washington, D.C., longtime correspondent Lesley Stahl told those gathered that the honor was particularly significant “when our precious First Amendment feels vulnerable and when my precious 60 Minutes is fighting, quite frankly, for our life.”
“The show is too important to the country, it has to continue, just not with me as the Executive Producer.”
It’s perhaps that last line that I would caution might have been a telltale sign that perhaps Owens and team might be a bit out of touch with the actual value of his work to his employer and, for that matter, its viewers. And, no, this has little to do with whatever one may think of my political leanings. Those conclusions tend to be incorrect and besides, I’m aware a few of our more loyal followers don’t necessarily want to hear them anyway.
Rather, I’d offer to look at the hard cold facts of numbers and who ultimately determine if Owens and team have a job in the first place as food for thought.
It seems our petulant leader of the free world gets his hissyfits any time the program dares to say “not nice” things about him. The latest such outburst arose from the April 13th episode, as Johnson described:
Last week, after the show ran segments on Ukraine and then Greenland, Trump lashed out at the show again, calling on his FCC chairman Brendan Carr to punish the network for the show.
“They are not a ‘news show,’ but a dishonest political operative simply disguised as ‘news,’ and must be responsible for what they have done, and are doing,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
And because we know he obsesses over old-school ratings the way folks of his generation used to when they actually mattered, he likely was all the more driven to whine after he learned that that episode reached 9.626 million viewers, a level not seen since last November, just after the election and when NFL football was the show’s lead-in, per the indispensable TVDB website. It should be noted that this episode just happened to follow an exciting Masters sudden-death playoff, and earlier spikes above the season average of 7.5 million viewers occurred when March Madness teed it up. So it’s difficult to say if the larger audience was present because of the subject matter or because they were still celebrating Rory McIlroy.
It’s indeed CBS’ second most popular show in a season where they’re still the most popular destination for TV viewers on most given nights. But it’s hardly the outlier it was back when Fat Orange Jesus was first forming his viewing habits. And considering even though it reaches more than 60 per cent more viewers than CBS’ second most popular unscripted series, SURVIVOR, it actually has a slightly lower adult 18-49 rating. Which means an awful lot of the folks that matter most to CBS’ ad sales team are indifferent to whatever stand Owens and team choose to take.
It should also be noted that it’s more than just the current administration that isn’t necessarily in love with decisions to take the show in certain directions. None other than the still-current owner of the company that signs the checks offered up her own thinly veiled summation, per THE WRAP’s Ross A. Lincoln:
Just hours after the surprise resignation of “60 Minutes” boss Bill Owens, Paramount Global non-executive chairwoman Shari Redstone described her views on the role of media in the current era, and what freedom of speech means.
Speaking to TheWrap after the premiere of the documentary “Children of October 7,” Redstone said, “there is nothing controversial about telling the truth. There’s nothing controversial about getting the real story out there. And I think companies have not only an opportunity, but a tremendous responsibility, to use the resources that they have to tell these stories and to get them to as many audiences, let people decide how they feel about something and how they react to something, but give them the facts.“
“The days of Walter Cronkite, where, whatever it is, people believed in the truth, people really crave the information they need to be independent and make their own judgments. That’s what freedom of speech is,” Redstone added.
But you see, Sharileh, the days of Walter Cronkite, much like 60 MINUTES’ once-massive audience, are forever gone. And I bet you know–or least may still employ a few smart folks that could point this out to you–a far less politically slanted slate of newsmagazine stories lacking a live sports lead-in can still attract as many folks to your network as a typical original episode of a scripted program. And even with all of those inflated salaries, it’s a more efficient production.
And I’d suspect that Sharileh’s misgivings are eclipsed by the management of two of the network’s more significant affiliate groups, Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcasting. We are well aware of the political leanings of Perry Sook and David Smith; if you’re not, our archives can catch you up. Together they control 63 of CBS’ affiliated stations, most in flyover states and markets outside of the Top 10 DMAs. But most of them draw higher ratings for 60 MINUTES than the ones that CBS owns and therefore contribute disproportionately to those overall stats.
Has anyone actually analyzed how many of those incremental viewers that drop in when the program takes on more polarizing issues stick around for WATSON and TRACKER? Let alone the other program apparently still under Owens’ purview, the recently revamped and still dead last CBS EVENING NEWS.
And has anyone actually asked any of the viewers of news broadcasts on those Nexstar and Sinclair-owned stations how they feel about segments on Ukraine and Greenland? Maybe they’re not quite as saber-rattling as our adolescent-in-chief, but I’d offer an educated guess they might not be all that thrilled, either.
You can see it as “caving in” to the draconian wishes of an aspirational despot where the only accurate use of the adjective “thin” would be his skin.
Or you can see it as perhaps being mindful of the current climate, for better or worse, on a network that hardly builds its overall business model on taking any stand at all.
These are questions that cry out to be asked, and in more robust financial times they often were. The answers might not be the ones one wants to hear, but as Redstone herself offered up, there is nothing controversial about telling the truth.
Messrs. Ellison and Shell, consider yourselves challenged to look into it once you’re on the clock. I hope you know where you could turn for help in doing so.
Until next time…
POSTSCRIPT: The show continues to make noise which, ironically, is giving it more air than we had thought when this musing first dropped. This otherwise mundane holiday week was hijacked by the furor of the decisions reached by the second Israel-first Jewish woman to seize control of it this year. CBS NEWS czarina Bari Weiss fiercely defended her decision in spite of intense backlash from reporters, producers and, yet again, those that ghoulishly invoke the long-dead Walter Cronkite as the gold standard somehow violated. When news broke of this last-minute decision my social media was flooded yet again with declarations of boycotts and calling for Weiss’ head to be served up on a platter to a cage of lions. Right now Weiss’ job one responsibility is to deliver eyeballs independent of variables like noise and partisanship in the wake of credible, recent third party research she cited that declares that a majority of Americans do not trust their news. On 12/14 60 MINUTES was viewed by 10.16M humans per Nielsen and TVDB. The episode that didn’t include the CACOT story as promotedthat supposedly drove so many over the edge was actually viewed by a smidge more–10.35M humans per Nielsen (many thanks, Steelers and Lions), analyst Rebecca Bunch and the TV Ratings Guide. Or more than four times the far more gleefully and liberally reported audience for the Kennedy Center Honors was two nights later. Memo to all: Nielsen counts hate-watchers and those too busy X-eeting to switch the channel just as much as they count people who actually choose to tune in.