Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, is becoming a member of the CBS News program “60 Minutes” as a correspondent, the present’s govt producer mentioned in a memo to workers on Tuesday.
Mr. Douthat is amongst a group of journalists becoming a member of for the present’s 59th season, which is able to premiere on Sept. 13. The author Sebastian Junger and Gianna Toboni, a former Vice News correspondent, will turn out to be contributors, together with Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS final month. Norah O’Donnell, the previous anchor of “CBS Evening News,” will probably be a correspondent as properly.
They are the primary important hires on the long-running Sunday program since CBS’s new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, orchestrated a shake-up that led to the departure of three prime correspondents this spring, together with the veteran journalist Scott Pelley.
Ms. Weiss has been attempting to rebuild the “60 Minutes” workers in current weeks after a tumultuous interval. In strikes that rattled this system’s personnel, she dismissed the correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, together with the present’s senior management group, together with its former govt producer Tanya Simon.
Mr. Pelley was fired after he protested these dismissals in a conflict with administration; a fourth correspondent, Anderson Cooper, left voluntarily.
Correspondents on “60 Minutes” are full-time reporters who produce in-depth tales, whereas contributors add evaluation, opinion and, periodically, reporting.
The appointment of Mr. Douthat, a conservative columnist and creator, is among the most notable hires made thus far by Ms. Weiss and Nick Bilton, who succeeded Ms. Simon as govt producer in May.
Mr. Douthat joined The Times in 2009. He hosts a standard Times podcast, “Interesting Times,” the place he has interviewed newsmakers together with Vice President JD Vance, the “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy and former Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
Katie Kingsbury, the opinion editor at The Times, mentioned in a memo to her workers that Mr. Douthat made the case for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism.”
“He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring,” she wrote.
The stakes are excessive for “60 Minutes” to show its journalistic mettle subsequent season. The three correspondents fired from the present have mentioned executives at CBS News tried to inject political bias into their segments. CBS News has denied these claims, and Ms. Weiss has mentioned so-called editorial interference is a part of her job as editor in chief.
Ms. Weiss requested Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and documentarian with no expertise in broadcast information, to broaden “60 Minutes” past a one-hour weekly broadcast and combine this system extra carefully into the remainder of CBS’s information division. In memos to the “60 Minutes” workers, Mr. Bilton mentioned he needed to modernize the present with out compromising the values that made it a pacesetter in TV journalism for practically six a long time.
