Bill Owens, head of ‘60 Minutes,’ quits show, citing loss of independence

Owens' resignation comes as CBS parent company Paramount Global has been working to settle a US$20 billion lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump.

Bill Owens, the top producer at 60 Minutes, announced Tuesday that he’s quitting the show because he’s not able to run the program like he has in the past.

In a memo to staff members, Owens wrote that is he no longer able to make independent decisions based on what is right for the audience of the investigative news program.

“Having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time and with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, as first reported by The New York Times.

Owens’ resignation comes as CBS parent company Paramount Global has been working to settle a US$20 billion lawsuit filed by U.S. President Donald Trump last fall. Trump took issue with the way the program edited an interview with then-vice president Kamala Harris, claiming the program was deceptively edited to favour Harris.

Trump also demanded a retraction and even suggested CBS’s broadcast license be revoked.

The network has denied Trump’s claims about its editing, saying in a statement last October, “Former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims against 60 Minutes are false,” and insisting that “the interview was not doctored” and “did not hide any part of” Harris’s answer to the question at issue.

In a separate statement, reports NBC News, 60 Minutes said it turned over an excerpt from the Harris interview to CBS’s Face the Nation program, which chose to use a longer clip of the former Democratic presidential candidate’s answer.