Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft said that he “hated” working on the show, describing the CBS News Sunday evening flagship as a toxic “snake pit” teeming with backstabbers and rife with paranoia.
The 80-year-old journalist, who retired in 2019 after 30 years on the show, sat down with former Fox News legend Bill O’Reilly for the latest episode of his “We’ll Do It Live” podcast for a discussion on his impressive broadcasting career, the current state of CBS News, and media bias.
When asked by the host whether he’d do it again, Kroft responded, “No, I probably wouldn’t do it again…I hated it.”
“I hated it!”
Steve Kroft, who was a 60 Minutes correspondent for thirty years, gave me a blunt answer on taking the job.
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“The job is just 24 hours a day,” he told O’Reilly. “I mean, you may get a couple of hours of bad sleep. Beepers going off, getting on jets, going here and there, the whole thing, then coming back and spending three or four days writing the script, and then going to the screenings, and then starting it all over again.”
“There was no civility at 60 Minutes,” Kroft said of the toxic work environment, adding, “If there was civility… You’d better check your wallet.”
“Everybody is so paranoid,” the retired newsman said of the business. “Everybody knows the environment, and they think that somebody is behind them, going to put a shiv in their back.”
“When I was tapped to go to 60 Minutes… not everybody was happy… you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies,” he told O’Reilly. “It’s just… a snake pit.”
Kroft revealed that he was warned by Dan Rather about the organizational culture and the “big cats” whose habitat was the newsroom. “Take one swat with a paw, and you’re gonna be limping for six months,” he said.
During his storied career, Kroft interviewed celebrities, scoundrels, and statesmen as well as U.S. presidents and, in 1992, scored a sit-down with Democrat presidential hopeful Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, after allegations of Slick Willie’s sexual infidelity first surfaced during the campaign.
“So tell me who is Gennifer Flowers and how do you know her?” Kroft hit Clinton right off the bat in the interview in which Mrs. Clinton stood by her man and later ripped him for asking “mean questions.”
The award-winning correspondent also interviewed former President Barack Obama on numerous occasions.
But he truly excelled as a reporter and was the first American journalist to be given access to the contaminated Chornobyl nuclear facility in the old Soviet Union, site of the 1986 reactor disaster.
“There are still some things I’d like to do that I haven’t done. I’m not getting any younger. I want to leave while I still have all of my marbles, the energy to enjoy life, and the curiosity to pursue some different things,” Kroft said at the time of his retirement. “I’ve done nearly 500 stories for this broadcast, and that has taken up most of the past 30 years of my life.”
The “snake pit” has been mired in a tumultuous period since Kroft’s retirement, in which its credibility has taken a major hit, including a “doctored” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris right before the 2024 election. The interview got “60 Minutes” sued by President Donald J. Trump, who alleged that it amounted to election interference.
CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, agreed to settle with Trump for $16 million over the deceptively edited interview, a black eye for “60 Minutes,” which it has yet to recover from.
Current CBS News editor Bari Weiss has been tasked with righting the ship and steering the network’s showcase back onto a course of doing hard news. According to a recent report, a “bloodbath” could be coming to “60 Minutes” in June as she cleans house.
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