The fallout continues from now President Donald Trump's lawsuit against CBS News for their edited "60 Minutes" interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris last October. In a Monday memo, Wendy McMahon, president of CBS News and Stations, announced she was leaving. She had a relatively short tenure, since August 2023, and is also considered to be closely aligned with Bill Owens, who had been an executive producer of "60 Minutes," but resigned almost a month ago.
The New York Times reported on part of McMahon's memo, as well as her aligning with Owens, plus some of the other tension during her tenure:
CBS News faced another shock wave on Monday after its president, Wendy McMahon, abruptly said that she would exit her post, the latest development in an ongoing showdown between the news division and President Trump.
Ms. McMahon, whose full title was president of CBS News and Stations, said in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”
Tensions between Ms. McMahon and CBS’s parent company, Paramount, have simmered for months, a period that Ms. McMahon described in her memo as “challenging.”
...
The situation prompted the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, to resign last month, saying he no longer enjoyed his usual journalistic independence. At the time, Ms. McMahon took pains to signal her support for Mr. Owens, saying that “standing behind” the producer “was an easy decision for me.”
Her embrace of Mr. Owens and “60 Minutes” put Ms. McMahon at odds with Paramount executives who were anxious about the show’s reporting about the Trump administration. Within CBS News, some journalists expected Ms. McMahon to be gone within months. But the timing of her announcement, less than 24 hours after Sunday’s season finale of “60 Minutes,” still raised eyebrows.
Ms. McMahon’s tenure atop CBS News, which she took over in August 2023, has been rocky at times.
An overhaul of “CBS Evening News,” introduced earlier this year, has failed to connect with viewers, and ratings for the flagship newscast have fallen sharply. Besides the tussle with Mr. Trump, the news division also faced internal criticism from [Shari] Redstone over a “60 Minutes” segment in January about the war between Israel and Hamas.
As the report mentioned, and as Townhall has been covering, Paramount and its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, are looking to settle with the Trump administration. Trump has also since upped his ask, and Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) was later added as a plaintiff as well. The lawsuit in question stems from the edited interview that "60 Minutes" did with Harris, who was then the Democratic nominee for 2024. Harris had given an answer on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was worse than her usual word salad. The entire unedited interview was, as Matt aptly called it, "Beyond Brutal." It also didn't help that "60 Minutes" had a pretty pathetic response in late October to being called out for the edited transcript.
The episode was even nominated for an Emmy earlier this month, amusingly enough for the Outstanding Edited Interview category, which sounds about right.
When it comes to notes on McMahon's tenure, it's also worth mentioning that CBS News' concerning coverage about the Israel-Hamas war is hardly limited to programming from January. More recently, in late March, "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl actually asked Keith Segel, who had been kept hostage by Hamas terrorists and had been starved, and beaten, "do you think they starved you, or they just didn't have food?"
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