NEW: Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes Poaches Star NY Times Columnist, Announces Other New Hires

Daniel Paik via AP

The New York Times’ Opinion columnist Ross Douthat will depart the newspaper for 60 Minutes. Douthat will serve as a correspondent for the show, and will be joined by Trevor Phillips, the network’s new Senior Global Affairs Correspondent; Sebastian Junger, who also joins as a contributor; and Gianna Toboni, who will also serve as a CBS News National Correspondent.

60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton made the announcement in an email to staff on Tuesday that was obtained by Mediaite, and the news was later shared via the show’s social media channels. Douthat joining 60 Minutes is certain to be seen as a win for embattled CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. 

“Today, I am pleased to share some great news, and the first of many exciting announcements to come. An exceptional lineup of journalists will be joining 60 Minutes, carrying on its tradition of fearless, independent and impartial reporting. I can’t wait for them to get started,” Bilton wrote in part.

Douthat “is one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy” he continued, and “has tackled politics, religion and culture-and what his own struggle with Lyme disease taught him about suffering. He makes controversial topics approachable and renders characters and points of view with richness and compassion. Ross will bring this big and ranging curiosity to our air. He will be based in New York.”

Toboni “spent a decade as a senior correspondent with VICE News and VICE on HBO, and comes to us most recently from CNN, where she is a reporter,” Bilton also wrote.

“Gianna is a journalist with extraordinary range. She’s interviewed members of ISIS and investigated cartel violence in Mexico. She’s also been recognized for her compassionate and incisive reporting on complex social and cultural issues, including America’s mass shootings and the death penalty,” he added.

Phillips, who will be based out of London, “is one of the most respected and trusted voices in the United Kingdom for his ability to ask the toughest questions and hold anyone in power to account. He will bring that same passion for the pursuit of the truth to 60 Minutes.”

Of the New York-based Junger, Bilton wrote, “We all remember The Perfect Storm. It landed with an electric charge in the world of reported nonfiction, defining an intense and intimate form of storytelling and establishing Sebastian as a generational talent. It was a bestseller, as were his next six books. Sebastian carried that intensity and that ethos of deep reporting to his work as a documentarian, broadcast journalist and war correspondent.”

The New York Times announced the news to the Opinion staff via email. “Ross Douthat is leaving Times Opinion to join ’60 Minutes.’ For 17 years and in thousands of columns, Ross has left an indelible mark on this report: arguments so carefully built that even readers who arrived hostile stayed to see how they’d hold up. That’s the job of a columnist, done in Ross’s hands about as well as it can be done,” the message, which was shared with Mediaite by the Times, read.

“Ross joined Times Opinion in 2009 at 29, one of the youngest columnists in the paper’s history. He arrived already fluent in a kind of thinking and writing many pundits never learn: the essay that changes its own mind partway through, in public, on purpose,” the message continued. “He made the case for a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism that never needed an enemy to define itself against. He wrote about decadence and renewal, about the Catholic Church he loves and challenges in equal measure, about the populist right he understood before most of us had a name for it. He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.”

This is a developing story and has been updated.

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