In media circles, this week’s hire of a prominent New York Times columnist as a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes was greeted with disbelief.
The collective response went something like this: “What?!”
Ross Douthat would not have been high on anyone’s list to replace the likes of Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, all experienced reporters who were let go in recent weeks from the venerable news show. Or the likes of Anderson Cooper, who left of his own accord amid the months-long tumult and internal complaints that political bias was being injected into 60 Minutes news reports.
Yes, it seemed downright odd. After all, Douthat has no broadcast television experience and he is – in the journalistic vernacular – an opinion guy, not a news guy. He’s certainly not a practitioner of investigative journalism, the longtime calling card of 60 Minutes.
Douthat is known for his lofty takes on national politics and religion – not for the usual reporting skills of grilling reluctant sources with tough questions and digging out information that somebody important doesn’t want you to have.
His Times boss, the top opinion editor, Katie Kingsbury, had kind words for Douthat in a staff memo, according to a Times article.
As a columnist, Douthat argued for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism”, Kingsbury wrote. “He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.”
Terrific qualities in an opinion writer, certainly, but not exactly a great fit for a job defined decades ago by the bulldog tenacity of the investigative reporter Mike Wallace.
But at the all-new 60 Minutes, the hire is being positioned as a coup. And, in fact, it lines up surprisingly well with the new leadership.
It all began when CBS News’s new ownership – led by the billionaire scion David Ellison – appointed Bari Weiss as editor in chief last October.
Like Douthat’s hire, it didn’t seem to make much sense on the surface.
She too lacked television experience, and she too had made her name on the opinion side of journalism, where she leaned right. She founded the Free Press, a successful digital media company that concentrates on opinion journalism, especially with an “anti-woke” flavor. Before that, she’d been an opinion editor at the New York Times, where she and Douthat had overlapped. Weiss quit the Times, complaining about its internal culture.
Her conservative profile, and her disagreements with legacy media, was just what Ellison wanted, as he tried to cozy up to Donald Trump and others in the administration. After all, Ellison was trying to get big corporate mergers approved and needed federal approval.
When it came time for Weiss to appoint a new executive producer for 60 Minutes, she chose Nick Bilton – another surprising hire who had no TV news experience and who shared roots at the New York Times.
If broadcast networks are judged by ratings, things aren’t going well so far. They have plummeted at CBS News, including at its evening news show, where Weiss had quickly installed a new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, to great fanfare.
With big-name talent departing and longtime viewers feeling angry and betrayed, Weiss and company are in serious rebuilding mode. 60 Minutes is perhaps the highest priority, in part because the controversies there attracted so much negative publicity.
Pelley went so far as to accuse Weiss of “murdering” the legendary program. “She was brought in to kill it and she’s been doing exactly that,” he charged in a staff meeting. His comments soon went viral and, despite his decades at CBS and his many awards and accolades, he was quickly shown the door.
In addition to Douthat, the CBS star Norah O’Donnell will join the show as a correspondent. Other new contributors include Sebastian Junger, the prominent author and former ABC News correspondent; Gianna Toboni, formerly of Vice; and CBS’s Trevor Phillips.
In announcing Douthat’s move, Nick Bilton waxed poetic. He is “a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy”.
But perhaps more than all that, elevated as it sounds, Douthat’s hire sends a clear message.
He may not be a TV guy, an investigative guy, or even a news guy – but he is one of America’s best-known conservative opinion journalists.
And at the CBS News of Bari Weiss and David Ellison, that’s the credential that seems to matter most.
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Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
