CNN anchor Anderson Cooper announced he wouldn’t renew his contract with CBS News as a reporter for 60 Minutes after 20 years. He claimed it was to spend more time with his family, which cynics never accept when politicians assert it. The Left wanted to blamed new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss for it.
Oliver Darcy marshaled his anonymous sources against Weiss for his website. “Status has learned that Cooper had grown increasingly uneasy with the rightward direction the network has charted under Weiss’s leadership & David Ellison’s ownership of parent company Paramount.”
What rightward shift?? There’s been talk about reaching out to the broad middle of America, but has that actually happened? Even delaying a segment -- like Sharyn Alfonsi's tirade against Trump's deportations to an El Salvadoran prison -- was somehow right-wing.
For our part, the most memorable Cooper segments on 60 Minutes were decidedly leftward -- as usual -- and soft as new snow, like the gush over Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in 2022. Sometimes, it bled over to CNN, where No-Conflicts Cooper lobbed softballs at his CBS colleague Scott Pelley after CNN aired George Clooney's CBS-puffing play about Edward R. Murrow.
Some of Cooper's CBS moments were typical Trump-trashing segments like the 26-minute Stormy Daniels/Michael Avenatti interview in 2018, when they were all the rage on liberal TV. Cooper pointed out, “Melania Trump had recently given birth to a son, just a few months before. Did he mention his wife or child at all in this?” Cooper asked Daniels if she was physically attracted to Trump (no) and did he use a condom (no). “I thought of it as a business deal,” she said.
Lefties like Darcy pretend 60 Minutes is the definition of "hard-hitting," but it's only toward one side. For the Democrats, it's a lot of "Syrupy Minutes."
One anonymous insider told Status that Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.” A second source was used to confirm Cooper’s exit was related to discomfort with Weiss.
Darcy connected the departure to a 60 Minutes piece Cooper had been working on about Trump’s decision to accept white refugees from South Africa. It's apparently been “subjected to an intense level of editorial scrutiny” from both Executive Producer Tanya Simon and Weiss. Whites apparently can’t feel endangered and apply for refugee status.
Darcy noted that Weiss isn’t adversarial with Cooper – she explored poaching him from CNN to be anchor of the CBS Evening News, which he declined. He claimed Weiss “not only failed to persuade Cooper to grow his footprint at the network, but ultimately helped chase him away from it entirely.” One industry observer told him: “This is another black eye for Bari.”
Similarly, Brian Steinberg at Variety was all about blaming Weiss: "60 Minutes, which features profiles and features along with investigative pieces, has seen its credibility subverted over the past two years as corporate managers failed to defend it from what was largely considered to be a nuisance suit from President Trump over the editing of a 2024 interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.”
