SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A major shift this week at the nation's longest-running prime time television show. It doesn't involve a household name, but it was stunning news for the richly honored "60 Minutes." Bill Owens, the show's longtime executive producer, quit, saying he could no longer operate with the independence he once had. Left unsaid was that the show's corporate owner is trying to finalize a sale and needs approval from the Trump administration. Also President Trump has sued CBS' parent company, Paramount, over a "60 Minutes" broadcast of an interview with Kamala Harris. NPR's David Folkenflik joins us now. David, thanks for being with us.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Pleasure.
SIMON: How did Bill Owens, "60 Minutes" executive producer, explain why he was leaving?
FOLKENFLIK: So this was a surprise. He called for an all-staff on Tuesday. People came in, many of them in person, some of them virtually, and it was intense, and it was tearful. He said he simply, as you put it, couldn't operate with the independence he needed to assure the journalistic integrity of the program. And that he thought, perhaps, if he left, it would allow the corporation to think more clearly about what it wanted the show to do and how it wanted to embody its principles of the past more than a half century of existence.
There is this intense scrutiny because of the lawsuit that you just alluded to. And as you mentioned, Shari Redstone, the controlling owner of Paramount, wants her multibillion-dollar sale approved. There's a lot hanging on it, and it has, of course, to be approved by federal authorities. That tension felt untenable to Owens. Redstone had essentially put a senior, and respected senior news executive, Susan Zirinsky, to kind of be a top figure of standards over all of the network shows. But at "60 Minutes," they took it to be focused particularly at them. They felt they were being monitored, and they felt they couldn't operate with the liberty they needed.
SIMON: And remind us of the special kind of disagreement President Trump seems to have with "60 Minutes."
FOLKENFLIK: The thing that's most immediate are a number of the hard-hitting reports that "60 Minutes" has done since he's returned to office in January. I think one of the more illuminating ones, particularly, was one in which they took a look - I think it was the first anyone had done this - at the criminal records of all the folks who had been rendered to incarceration in El Salvador. And it turned out that more than three-quarters did not have criminal records, despite the way they had been characterized by the administration. That was one that he took particular exception to. So he's objected to scrutiny, but he's also objected to that lawsuit.
SIMON: What about that lawsuit?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I want to stress to listeners how thin the ground seemed to be for President Trump's lawsuit here. Trump was suing in a sympathetic federal court in Texas, claiming a kind of fraud as a result of "60 Minutes" editing of an interview it did with Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign last fall. It ran different answers from Harris to the same question as it was presented initially on the Sunday morning public affairs show, "Face The Nation," as it did later on "60 Minutes" itself. Trump was saying they were trying to clean up her incompetence or her answers on a touchy question about Israel and Gaza.
These are editorial judgments. I've spoken to just reams of lawyers and First Amendment scholars. They say this is absolutely defended by the First Amendment. This is not something you can claim is fraud. And, you know, he's been filing this as a candidate, but yet you're hearing him echoed and supported by figures who are now government officials.
SIMON: That lawsuit was filed by candidate Trump, but now he's President Trump and has the powers of the executive branch.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it does, and it's kind of astonishing to see the muscular efforts of the chairman of Federal Communications Commission, and that is Brendan Carr. He's revived a complaint about all kinds of broadcast networks and investigations at FCC. But one of them about CBS and its broadcast on its stations of that "60 Minutes" interview that had been previously dismissed as an incursion into essentially free speech grounds.
And the FCC is also reviewing Shari Redstone's sale of Paramount because it also involves the transfer of 27 local TV licenses. Well, in a sense, you're seeing these pressure points being utilized against CBS by the powers of government explicitly because of the concerns the president raised in his private lawsuit as a citizen. You know, you have CBS and Bill Owens, who, until now, the head of "60 Minutes," saying he would not apologize. Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS stations and news, saying she supported Owens and everything he's done. And yet, above them, you're seeing Shari Redstone try to settle this lawsuit, find a path out of it. She is acknowledging the power that the president and his allies have in government. But nowhere are we acknowledging that this would seem to be an extraordinary abuse of power in supporting the president in his private interests, using the levers of power to do so.
SIMON: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thanks so much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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