Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, is leaving to join the CBS News program “60 Minutes” as a correspondent, the show’s executive producer said in a memo to staff on Tuesday.
Mr. Douthat is among a group of journalists joining for the show’s 59th season, which will premiere on Sept. 13. The writer Sebastian Junger and Gianna Toboni, a former Vice News correspondent, will become contributors, along with Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS last month. Norah O’Donnell, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” will be a correspondent as well.
They are the first significant hires at the long-running Sunday program since CBS’s new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, orchestrated a shake-up that led to the departure of three top correspondents this spring, including the veteran journalist Scott Pelley.
Ms. Weiss has been trying to rebuild the “60 Minutes” staff in recent weeks after a tumultuous period. In moves that rattled the program’s personnel, she dismissed the correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, along with the show’s senior leadership team, including its former executive producer Tanya Simon.
Mr. Pelley was fired after he protested those dismissals in a clash with management; a fourth correspondent, Anderson Cooper, left voluntarily.
Correspondents on “60 Minutes” are full-time reporters who produce in-depth stories, while contributors periodically add analysis, opinion and reporting.
The appointment of Mr. Douthat, a conservative columnist and author, is one of the most notable hires made so far by Ms. Weiss and Nick Bilton, who succeeded Ms. Simon as executive producer in May.
Mr. Douthat, who had been an editor at The Atlantic, joined The Times in 2009. He hosts a popular Times podcast, “Interesting Times,” where he has interviewed newsmakers including Vice President JD Vance, the “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy and former Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
Ms. Weiss and Mr. Douthat overlapped at The Times’s Opinion section before she resigned in 2020.
Katie Kingsbury, the opinion editor at The Times, said in a memo to her staff that Mr. Douthat made the case for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism.”
“He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring,” she added.
Ms. O’Donnell was promoted after being featured in some notable segments on “60 Minutes” this past season. She interviewed President Trump, who bristled at some of her questions, in the aftermath of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April. And she was one of the journalists behind an interview with three Roman Catholic cardinals that seemed to trigger a social media tirade from Mr. Trump, a regular “60 Minutes” viewer.
The stakes are high for “60 Minutes” to prove its journalistic mettle next season. The three fired correspondents have said executives at CBS News tried to inject political bias into their segments. CBS News has denied those claims, and Ms. Weiss has said so-called editorial interference is part of her job as editor in chief.
Ms. Weiss asked Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and documentarian with no experience in broadcast news, to expand “60 Minutes” beyond a one-hour weekly broadcast and integrate the program more closely into the rest of CBS’s news division. In memos to the “60 Minutes” staff, Mr. Bilton said he wanted to modernize the show without compromising the values that made it a pacesetter in TV journalism for nearly six decades.
In a memo to staff on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton said he was optimistic about the show’s tradition of “fearless, independent and impartial reporting.”
“I can’t wait for them to get started,” he said.
