60 Minutes

For nearly six decades, Americans have tuned in on Sunday evenings to watch the ticking hands of a stopwatch. In the process, they have made 60 Minutes, the CBS news show that debuted in 1968, one of the most successful and significant news programs in broadcast history.

Origin story

Created by Don Hewitt and grounded in investigative journalism, 60 Minutes is television’s longest continually running prime-time series. The first of the so-called TV “newsmagazines,” the program has become the industry standard for television journalism and has influenced similar (but less successful) programs on other networks. In 2026, 60 Minutes was rated the most-watched news program for the 52nd consecutive year. It is widely respected for its reporting, having won 26 Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence and more Emmy Awards for news and documentary programming than any other prime-time show.

Even as generations of Americans have watched the program’s now-familiar format, when 60 Minutes made its debut on September 24, 1968, it was a risky experiment in television journalism. The show’s first episode didn’t include the iconic stopwatch (that would come several weeks later), but it did feature the program’s lead correspondents, Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, explaining to the audience what the show aimed to do:

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If this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality. But we do think this is sort of a new approach. We realize, of course, that new approaches are not always instantly accepted. We’ll see.

The format was envisioned by Hewitt, who wanted to bring information programming to a broader audience, saying he wanted to create a show that “d reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction.” The program was intended to be eclectic in nature, featuring roughly three 15-minute segments in each episode on topics that were of national interest, whether that was politics, foreign affairs, celebrity interviews, or fashion. A sampling of segments from the first season of 60 Minutes included:

• An interview with controversial presidential candidate George Wallace
• An investigation into sexual abuse in prisons
• A tour of a French cottage with the duke and duchess of Windsor
• A report from Reasoner and Wallace on tensions between Israel and Lebanon
• A report on how Venice was becoming a tourist attraction

The correspondents drove the reporting and became fixtures of the show, introducing themselves in the weekly opening with “I’m [fill in their names].” Over the years those names have included some of television’s best-known and most-respected journalists:

• Mike Wallace
• Harry Reasoner
• Morley Safer
• Diane Sawyer, the program’s first full-time woman correspondent
• Ed Bradley, the program’s first Black correspondent
• Lesley Stahl
• Scott Pelley
• Steve Kroft
• Anderson Cooper
• Norah O’Donnell

From 1979 to 2011 commentator Andy Rooney closed the show by spending “a few minutes” offering his sometimes lighthearted, sometimes cranky perspective on the world.

How 60 Minutes became “must-watch TV”

Hewitt’s experiment took a few years to earn a devoted audience, but after airing mostly on Tuesday nights, in 1975 the program settled into its Sunday time slot and became appointment viewing for many. There are a variety of reasons for the program’s success, including its innovative, cinematic storytelling, but its ability to spend more time on a topic than was typical for broadcast news programs led to some riveting investigations, provocative interviews, and informative explanatory stories. There were times when the stories were so compelling that 60 Minutes itself made headlines. Some of its most high-profile segments have included:

• The My Lai admission: In 1969, as news of the murders of unarmed Vietnamese civilians committed by American service members at My Lai unfolded, Wallace interviewed veteran Paul Meadlo, who had participated in the atrocities. When Wallace asked him how he could have shot babies, Meadlo replied: “I don’t know; just one of them things.”
• The Clintons interview: In January 1992 the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton was in peril. He was facing allegations by Gennifer Flowers of a yearslong extramarital affair. In an interview that aired immediately after the Super Bowl—therefore garnering a huge audience—Bill and Hillary Clinton were interviewed by Steve Kroft. The interview, during which Hillary Clinton uttered the enduring phrase “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” is recognized as having saved Bill Clinton’s candidacy.
• The tobacco whistleblower: In 1995 the former head of research at tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand, told Wallace in an interview that the company knew nicotine was addictive, despite company officials denying that. The interview, however, was quashed by CBS, fearing a lawsuit from the tobacco company. The interview ultimately aired after The Wall Street Journal published a story about Wigand’s claims. Jeff Fager, who would go on to succeed Hewitt as the executive producer of 60 Minutes, called the incident “a low point in our history.”
• The Timothy McVeigh interview: In 2000 Bradley conducted an interview with the convicted perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing while he was on death row. The interview was divisive, with some questioning why McVeigh would be given such a high-profile platform. It ultimately led to a ban on press interviews with federal death row inmates.
• The Stormy Daniels interview: In 2018 Cooper interviewed Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who said she had a sexual relationship with Donald Trump. The interview, which included some tawdry details, drew enormous ratings for the program.

Me Too allegations

Perhaps because of the groundbreaking journalism it produced, 60 Minutes had a reputation as being a difficult, even cutthroat, place to work. But the workplace issues went beyond the standard competitive nature of journalism. Wallace, who died in 2012, was notorious for inappropriate behavior, including verbal and at times physical assaults, according to longtime producer Ira Rosen in his 2021 book Ticking Clock. CBS settled a lawsuit in the 1990s against Hewitt, who died in 2009, and agreed to pay a female employee who said Hewitt repeatedly assaulted her a stipend for life.

The behavior was not limited to the 20th century. At the height of the Me Too movement, CBS dismissed 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose in 2017 after multiple women accused him of making sexual advances in the workplace. Less than a year later, longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Fager was fired after threatening a CBS reporter working on a story about allegations of sexual misconduct involving Fager.

Impact of CBS News shake-up

The upheaval that swirled around the program in the late 2010s seemed mild compared with the chaos that swirled around the program in the mid-2020s. In October 2024 then-presidential candidate Trump sued CBS over what he claimed was the deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris. CBS’s owner, Paramount Skydance, settled the suit in July 2025, paying the president $16 million. The producer on the segment called the settlement a “cowardly capitulation” by Paramount.

Months after, in October 2025, Paramount announced that former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss had been tapped to head CBS News. The move was met with skepticism within CBS, in part because Weiss’s background is in opinion journalism and she had no television experience.

In one of her first high-profile decisions, she canceled the airing of a 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s CECOT prison, just hours before it was to be broadcast on December 21, 2025. The segment, which had cleared the program’s editorial review process, was pulled when Weiss said it needed, among other things, an on-camera interview with someone from the Trump administration. The segment’s chief reporters said the White House, State Department, and Homeland Security Department had been asked to comment on the reporting. The administration declined to be interviewed. For her part, Weiss said of her decision: “Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom.”

In February 2026 Cooper announced that he was leaving the program after being a correspondent for two decades, though he would continue to work for CNN. Cooper said he was leaving to spend more time with his family, adding, “Being a correspondent at 60 Minutes has been one of the great honors of my career.”

In May 2026 Weiss announced the firing of 60 Minutes veteran Tanya Simon as executive producer. Simon was replaced by Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and screenwriter who has no experience in broadcast news. Two of the program’s correspondents—including Sharyn Alfonsi, who had been the reporter on the CECOT story, and a number of producers—were also fired. The firings led to a contentious meeting between Bilton and the 60 Minutes staff, during which journalist Scott Pelley engaged in a heated exchange with Bilton, saying that Weiss’s intention is to end the program. “She is murdering 60 Minutes.…She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.” A day after the exchange, Bilton announced that Pelley had been fired.

Several days later veteran correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim announced that they would stay with the program, writing in a joint memo to colleagues:

If we can continue doing the work that made this show what it is—committing acts of independent, fearless journalism and storytelling—we’re here for it. If not, we leave.

In July, less than two months before the start of the program’s 59th season on September 13, 2026, CBS News announced that it had hired Ross Douthat, an opinion journalist from The New York Times as a new 60 Minutes correspondent. Former CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell will also serve as a correspondent. Additionally writer Sebastian Junger, former Vice News correspondent Gianna Toboni, and British journalist Trevor Phillips will be contributors.