Longtime “60 Minutes” hosts and correspondents Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker have confirmed that they will remain with the venerable CBS news magazine, Variety reports, following the firing of colleague Scott Pelley.
L. Jon Wertheim, a part-time correspondent who joined the show in 2017, is also confirmed to be staying through the upcoming season, which is slated to air this fall on CBS.
“We have decided to stay on,” the trio reportedly said in a memo to the show’s staff on Friday, June 5. “We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at ’60 Minutes.’ … Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships. Collaboration and argument are the way we have always worked at ’60.'”
Stahl is one of the longest-tenured “60 Minutes” correspondents in the show’s history, joining the show in 1991. She has interviewed dozens of politicians and world leaders, including a contentious 2020 interview with President Donald Trump that led to controversy, with Trump storming out of the interview and later posting the footage on social media ahead of its official airing.
Whitaker joined “60 Minutes” in 2014 after two decades as a CBS News correspondent. He traveled the world for the show, reporting from Asia, Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the Middle East, with his report on a Swiss banking data leak winning an Emmy.
60 Minutes has been in turmoil for months
“60 Minutes” — one of the longest-running and most respected shows on television — has been experiencing serious upheaval since Bari Weiss took over as editor-in-chief of CBS News last October. (Weiss, a former New York Times columnist who ran the media company The Free Press, was installed by new Paramount CEO David Ellison following the Skydance merger.) Weiss angered “60 Minutes” staffers in December by pulling a report on the treatment of detainees in a prison for Venezuelan migrants just hours before it was set to air. The report aired a month later with minor revisions.
Staffers have accused Weiss of bowing to political pressure and shaping “60 Minutes” stories to appease right-wing voices loyal to President Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper, who served as a “60 Minutes” correspondent for 20 years, left the show last month, stating on his way out that “I hope the core of what ’60 Minutes’ is always remains… I think the independence of ’60 Minutes’ has been critical.” Fellow correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi, who worked on the pulled report about migrant detainees, and Cecilia Varga were fired that same month.
Weiss brought in Vanity Fair contributor Nick Bilton to serve as the show’s new executive producer, a move that angered correspondent Scott Pelley, leading to a fiery confrontation that ended with Pelley’s dismissal this month. Pelley, who had appeared on “60 Minutes” since 2003, fired back in a statement, alleging that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and told him “to include assertions that are unverified.” He added that “the leadership of ’60 Minutes’ is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”
