A longtime producer has announced his departure from 60 Minutes — lamenting that his exit from the flagship CBS News program was “overshadowed” by the removal of his colleagues under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ leadership.
Henry Schuster, who had worked for 60 Minutes since 2007, shared the news of his departure on LinkedIn, writing in a Monday post that it was “time for a change” and that he had been “thinking about leaving for a while.”
“It has been a great run at 60 Minutes and what I got to do there was extraordinary. But I have been thinking about leaving for a while now and when the opportunity presented itself in February, I took it. And finally, it is official,” he wrote, suggesting that he took a buyout when they were offered by the network earlier this year.
Schuster alluded to the recent staffing shakeups under Weiss, whose “anti-woke” media outlet, The Free Press, was bought by CBS parent company, Paramount, last year. Weiss, who has no broadcast journalism experience, fired executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. She then hired tech journalist Nick Bilton as executive producer and fired correspondent Scott Pelley after the two clashed.
While Schuster was leaving on his own accord, he noted his exit “has been overshadowed by the forced departures of so many colleagues and friends at the broadcast.”
The Independent has contacted CBS for comment.
The veteran producer’s departure comes amidst turmoil at the legacy broadcaster under Weiss’ direction.
Weiss was hired as editor-in-chief by CBS’s new owner, David Ellison, a tech heir and ally of President Donald Trump, after his company Skydance Media bought CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, for $8 billion last year.
The editor-in-chief has been accused by critics of being too Trump-friendly, and her hiring prompted top producers to quit on ideological grounds, accusing her of dragging CBS News’s editorial stance to the right.
She stirred up controversy soon after joining the network, when she abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison off the air in December.
The correspondent who reported the piece, Alfonsi, was fired last month after sparring with Weiss over the piece. Another beloved correspondent, Pelley, was fired after 37 years with the network. He was let go after he apparently trashed Weiss in a meeting, saying she was “murdering” the program.
Pelley, 68, claimed the network was “on fire” and called for Weiss’ removal in an interview with The New York Times.
“They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before,” he said.
While Pelley acknowledged that it may have been hyperbolic of him to accuse Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes, he insisted that the language was necessary to capture “the scale” of what happened.
“We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes?” he said.
Meanwhile, Shuster, who worked at CNN for 25 years and co-wrote the true crime book “Hunting Eric Rudolph,” said he wasn’t sure what his next career move would be. He noted in his post that he’s not “the retiring type.”
“I will think about what comes next. Maybe I will finally get my high school diploma, or see if I have another book in me. Or maybe something else…” he wrote. “I will try to avoid being a cliché, so I’m not starting a podcast or Substack. At least not now.”
