Mutiny at CBS: Insiders reveal back-biting chaos behind scenes at 60 Minutes as the show’s biggest star suffers crippling ‘self-inflicted wound’

The clock is ticking for ’60 Minutes.’

The once-esteemed CBS News flagship program is in a tailspin, according to insiders.

After the abrupt resignation of a top producer and a jarring on-air diatribe against the network’s corporate owner, delivered by one of the show’s most prominent anchors, things appear to be going from bad to worse.

Sources familiar with ’60 Minutes’ staff have exclusively revealed to the Daily Mail that the beleaguered newsmagazine program – plagued by ethics complaints and wilting under outside scrutiny – is in chaos, even as it braces for another blow.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, is entering into talks with lawyers for President Donald Trump to resolve claims that ’60 Minutes’ deceptively edited an interview with his 2020 presidential opponent, Kamala Harris.

Shari Redstone, daughter of the late media magnate Sumner Redstone and the person effectively in control of Paramount, has said that she wants to resolve the dispute.

Perhaps, it is no coincidence that Redstone is also seeking to sell Paramount to a major Hollywood studio – a sale that requires the Trump Administration’s approval.

Meanwhile, all this is playing out against the backdrop of an American media institution is disarray.

In the final minute of Sunday evening’s program, veteran ’60 Minutes’ host Scott Pelley shocked audiences with a rogue monologue obliquely criticizing Paramount after the sudden departure of executive producer Bill Owens earlier that week.

Pelley claimed that ‘Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,’ pointed out the pending merger and said that Owens concluded that he had ‘lost the independence that honest journalism requires.’ So, he quit.

Insiders tell the Daily Mail that Pelley’s rebuke was kept quiet among in-the-know staffers until airtime and the network was left reeling by the public airing of dirty laundry.

Morale in the CBS newsroom had already plummeted following Owens’ farewell last week, said sources, and Pelley’s stinging criticism only made things worse for panic-stricken executives forced to do damage control.

‘Pelley’s monologue feels like another self-inflicted wound for ’60 Minutes,” Catherine Herridge, a former CBS News senior investigative correspondent, told the Daily Mail. Herridge – who was fired by CBS News last year and has alleged that news executives there attempted to censor her reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – said network alumni are lamenting the state of the program.

‘Former ’60 Minutes’ staffers have complained to me that it is not the ’60 Minutes’ of Mike Wallace, Steve Kroft and tobacco industry whistleblowers,’ she said, referencing the program’s heyday. Now, Herridge said, the program is known for botching news, not breaking it.

”60 Minutes’ has dismissed some of the biggest political stories of the last decade as conspiracies, including the Hunter Biden laptop,’ she observed.

Indeed, veteran ’60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl insisted in a 2020 interview with Trump that the contents of the Biden laptop could not be verified, which Herridge slammed as ‘disappointing and wrong’ and ‘suggested a lack of journalistic curiosity.’

More than two years later, the network admitted the laptop’s authenticity.

Then in January of this year, the Anti-Defamation League expressed outrage over a ’60 Minutes’ report that featured accounts from former State Department officials who painted US support for Israel as problematic.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt accused the show of portraying a one-sided account: ‘Where are the counter perspectives to those interviewed? Where is the mention of the nearly 100 hostages – including Americans – STILL in captivity!? What kind of journalism is that?’ he tweeted.

’60 Minutes’ latest issues spring from an October interview of Vice President Harris during her bid for the executive office.

President Trump sued Paramount and CBS a few days before the November election for $10 billion, alleging ‘deceptive’ editing of Harris’s interview.

In February, the FCC probe requested that CBS make the full transcript of the interview public.

CBS claims they cut down Harris’s answers for clarity and brevity, but critics alleged the edit made Harris’s answers to questions on the Israel-Hamas war seem more coherent than they were.

‘While the edit that sparked the controversy was not a technical foul, a fair-minded review showed ’60 Minutes’ did Harris big favors in the edit room,’ Herridge said. ‘It transformed rambling, word salad responses into a crisp, succinct broadcast segment.’

But even that is not the end of the ’60 Minutes’ saga.

According to Herridge, ‘the heavy-handed edit of the Harris interview raises legitimate questions about whether, in October 2023, ’60 Minutes’ gave President Joe Biden the same favorable treatment in the edit room that concealed his cognitive decline.’

Of course, within a year, Biden dropped out of the race as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Herridge has called for the release of that unedited video and transcript as well.

Reports that ’60 Minutes’ corporate owners are preparing to settle Trump’s lawsuit must come as another damaging smack to the staff at CBS News. But, perhaps, it may signal a new era – one in which the reputation of this legacy brand is restored.

Only time will tell.