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Many of you have seen or heard or watched what Scott Pelley said on Sixty Minutes on Sunday evening. It was in reference to longtime executive producer Bill Owens announcing to his staff last week that he's leaving, citing corporate interference at the most watched news program in the US. Here's what he said. Quote, Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost his independence. That honest journalism
requires the independence that John's journalism requires. No one here is happy about it. Joining us now with an inside look at everything happening at sixty Minutes is Lucas shad Managing editor for Media Entertainment. He joins us from Los Angeles. Lucas, I feel like everything at this point is political, But truly this story is political.
What's going on here, It's all tied up into the ongoing saga at Paramount Global, which has been in talks
to sell itself for eighteen months. But Scott Pelly's comments and the resignation of our I should say, the departure of Billow and they didn't technically resign, I think is the result or the culmination really of months of tension between Cherry Redstone, who is the chairperson of Paramount Global, whose family controls the company, and her news division, and that started with frustrations related to kind of Gaza coverage because Sherry is very passionate about the state of Israel.
That started on CBS this morning, continued on Sixty Minutes, and then as she realized that Donald Trump suit against Sixty Minutes, which was related to the editing of a pam La Harris interview, might jeopardize the sale of the company, it just escalated. And so you've seen her both publicly and privately clashing with that news division, ultimately leading in the news of the last week.
Lucas, tell us what your reporting has shown about those public and private clashes, and just how unprecedented this is to see the chair of a parent company of a news organization intervene in coverage like this.
Well, there was a CBS This Morning segment in late September I believe might have been early October, but right around there where they interviewed Tanahasey Coates, who is the author of a new book called The Message, and a particular anchor, Tondakapil, was aggressive, shall we say, in talking to and questioning tanahase The News division ended up scolding him, and then Shay Redstone came out publicly and said that they made a mistake in doing so and she didn't
think that his questions were over the line. And January sixty Minutes did a piece on members of the State Department resigning in protests because of the kind of US's support for Israel and some of the violence in Gaza. She didn't like that piece, and that was when she started sort of privately saying maybe we should make a change at sixty minutes. And it's really kind of it's continued from there. I mean, you asked unprecedented. I don't
know that it's unprecedented. I mean people who own news companies tend to like to influence what their news outlets say. You know, some of that is just in the opinion. Some of it's not. You know, we had John Malone, who was one of the largest shareholders and Warner Brothers Discovery talk I think pretty openly after he helped or orchestrate the merger of Time, Warner and Discovery about how CNN had maybe tilted a little too far to the left.
So there's it's sort of an evergreen topic. But people do seem particularly perturbed in this case, partially because sixty minutes is such a story brand and as operated with a tremendous amount of independence over the years, and partially because most people think that Trump suits against sixty minutes is completely meritless.
Hey, Lucas, I want to know about sixty Minutes in the future of sixty Minutes without longtime executive producer Bill Owens and with Scott Pelly making these comments on Sunday Night. I mean, is this, in your view, going to be a news program that will continue to have the influence that it's had over the last few years many years?
I think so yeah. I mean, look, I view what Bill Owens and Scott Pelly have done as more warning signals there's nothing that has changed about the programming of the show, right, even though Shay Redstone wanted to know about upcoming stories about Trump. They did a piece on Trump on Sunday. Right, They're not changing their programming now,
will this be different in the new regime? Are they going to hire some new producer of sixty minutes who is more pliant as part of getting their deal approved by the FCC? Theyre going to eliminate some of the
journalistic independence that it is enjoyed. Those are possible. None of that's happened yet, and so I think what you're seeing is a lot of news people concerned about what could happen, and so it's very hard for me to project out what it will because at the moment, I think the brand of sixty minutes is fine and the average person has no idea that any of this happened.
It's a good point, Lucas, just quickly, what did the sixty minutes employees have to say about Bill's departure.
I mean, they're all they're all spooped and very sad. You know, we spoke with one of them on the record, many of them off the record or on background, and yet they're they're you know, they all revere Bill as a journalist and kind of stand behind him. And don't like this idea that their owner is meddling and what they're trying to do. I think, you know, sixty minutes, as I said earlier, has long had a really strong degree of independence, and that has meant sort of ignoring
what their own and bosses want to say. And this notion that anyone is trying to take that away from them, you know, is frightening and concerning to them.
All Right, Lucas, gonna leave it there. I know you got a run. We appreciate you joining us today. That's Lucas Shaw, Managing Editor, Media and Entertainment for Bloomberg News, joining us out there in Los Angeles. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App.
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