60 Minutes Icon Steve Kroft Warns Show ‘No Longer Exists’ After Firings of Scott Pelley, Others

(AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Veteran CBS correspondent Steve Kroft warned that the 60 Minutes viewers have known for decades “no longer exists” as he argued the news magazine has been fundamentally altered after a slew of firings.

Kroft, who spent three decades at 60 Minutes before retiring in 2019, spoke to New York Magazine for an interview published on Thursday, just days after the tumultuous dismissal of correspondent Scott Pelley after a fierce clash with the show’s new executive producer Nick Bilton at his first team meeting.

Pelley’s exit was just one of several in recent months that impacted the show’s executive and reporting teams.

“I think basically 60 Minutes, as the audience has known it, no longer exists,” Kroft said. “The firings are too substantial.”

He continued: “All of the people involved are very good journalists, and the new management, [CBS News editor-in-chief] Bari Weiss and [Paramount CEO] David Ellison, have made it clear they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want. They thought that what 60 Minutes was doing had become outdated and old and musty and needed to be changed, in spite of the fact that the audience has gone up 9 percent in the last year.”

The former correspondent said, given the upheaval, he struggled to envision what the show will look like when it returns in the fall.

“It seems almost impossible for me to imagine what kind of a show they can put on in September,” Kroft added.

Kroft traced the current crisis back to President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News over the editing of a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, later settled the case while seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance.

According to Kroft, that dispute marked the beginning of a broader conflict over editorial independence at the network.

“There was the intimidation factor,” he said. “People had become extremely nervous about what kinds of stories they could suggest, what kinds of stories they could work on, and how any story that would be critical of the Trump administration would face major obstacles to getting on the air.”

Kroft argued that “what made 60 Minutes great” was that the show’s team was “unafraid to take on the government.”

“It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without 60 Minutes, or a show like 60 Minutes, which is not afraid to take on the government. You see the timidity all across the broadcast schedule right now,” he said.

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