Henry Schuster is leaving 60 Minutes after working on the broadcast since 2007, and he says the move became official on Monday after he had been thinking about it for months. In a post on LinkedIn, the longtime producer wrote that it was time for a change and that when an opportunity came up in February, he took it.
That makes Schuster the latest familiar name to go as 60 Minutes remains caught in a round of departures and firings under Bari Weiss, CBS's editor-in-chief. Weiss has fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, and correspondent Scott Pelley after he clashed with her, while also bringing in tech journalist Nick Bilton as executive producer. The changes have given the country’s best-known news magazine a very different look inside a few short months.
Schuster did not frame his exit as a protest or a break. He said he had been thinking about leaving for a while and took the chance that appeared in February. But he also said the timing of his departure was overshadowed by the forced exits of so many colleagues and friends at the broadcast, a line that captures the split inside the program: one person walks out on his own, while others are being pushed.
The backdrop is a broader upheaval at CBS News after Paramount was bought by Skydance Media for $8 billion last year and David Ellison put Weiss in charge as editor-in-chief. Critics have said Weiss is dragging CBS News to the right, and some top producers have quit on ideological grounds since her hiring. The most visible rupture came in December, when Weiss abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador's CECOT prison off the air.
That fight has kept spilling into public view. Alfonsi was fired last month after sparring with Weiss over the El Salvador piece, and Pelley, who was later fired after 37 years with the network, told that CBS was on fire and called for Weiss's removal. He also said the people running the place do not know what they are doing and that he had never seen a subtle political bias like this at 60 Minutes before.
For Schuster, the open question is not whether he wanted out. He did. The question is what the new version of 60 Minutes can hold together now that even a voluntary departure lands like part of a purge.
