Former 60 Minutes Correspondent Spills the Dirt to Bill O’Reilly About Hating 30-Season CBS Gig

Former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft admitted to Bill O’Reilly that he “hated” his 30 season gig with CBS and he wouldn’t do it again if he had a do-over.

Kroft joined O’Reilly on the recently-launched We’ll Do It Live! podcast where the two press veterans discussed major moments from their careers, as well as their thoughts on where media stands today.

O’Reilly blasted the current state of 60 Minutes and CBS, which has gone through recent major changes under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. One of those changes was introducing Tony Dokoupil to the anchor gig on CBS Evening News.

Kroft described his time with 60 Minutes as a “snake pit.” During his 30 seasons at 60 Minutes, Kroft won 11 Emmy Awards and five Peabody Awards. Kroft retired from the position in 2019.

He told O’Reilly:

I can remember when I was tapped to go to 60 minutes I thought this was fantastic and I expected a lot of people would just come up and say, that’s really great, I’m really happy for you, whatever the thing right is and then you realize after a while that not everybody was happy that I got this job. There were other people… that wanted it. And so then you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies. And that’s, it’s just, you know, it’s a snake pit.

O’Reilly asked Kroft if he’d do it again if he could, and Kroft gave a frank answer.

He said:

I think that I, no, I probably wouldn’t do it again… I hated it. I mean, I was, look — the best job I ever had at CBS when I was a correspondent at the London Bureau and I got to see the world, that was the job I always wanted. 60 Minutes was really appealing, and I thought, I wasn’t really sure I was ever going to get there. I didn’t really seriously think about it. When I did, there’s so many things that, first of all, the job is just 24 hours a day. I mean, you may get a couple hours of bad sleep. Beepers going off — they had beepers — beepers going off, getting on jets, going here and there, the whole thing, then coming back and spending, you know, three or four days writing the script, and then going to the screenings and then getting on, starting it all over again.

Kroft still said there were “exhilarating” parts of the job.

“It was exhilarating in the sense that the reason I loved the job was because of the stories that I could do, and the fact that they liked good stories,” he said. “The level, you can’t go into that job and not do — I was kind of at a disadvantage. I was the first person on that show that had not been an anchorman. I wasn’t really well known. I’d been, you know, a lot on the evening news and was obviously, and I had been at West 57th. But I had to keep doing it. I had to keep doing what I had been doing.”

Watch above via We’ll Do It Live! podcast.

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