CBS cancels CECOT’s prison segment ’60 Minutes’, sparking backlash
CBS pulled a “60 Minutes” show about El Salvador’s CECOT prison hours before it aired, citing “the need for further reporting.”
Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft has revealed he “hated” working on the show.
The 80-year-old retired journalist sat down with Bill O’Reilly’s “We’ll Do It Live!” On the April 2 episode of the podcast, he looked back on his career at CBS, which included 30 seasons of “60 Minutes.” When O’Reilly asked Kraft if he would ever work with “60 Minutes” again, he had a surprising answer.
The veteran broadcaster cited the exhausting and demanding nature of the job.
“You only have 24 hours a day to work,” he said. “So you might lose a few hours of sleep. The buzzer goes off, you get on a jet, you go here, you go there, you do it all over again, you come back, you spend three or four days writing the script, then you go to a screening and start all over again.”
While Kraft said it was “exhilarating” and rewarding to tell “a good story,” he agreed with O’Reilly’s assessment that making friends in the TV news industry is difficult.
“If people seem really friendly, you should check their wallets,” he quipped.
“Everyone is very paranoid,” Kraft said, explaining the cutthroat nature of the business. “Everyone knows the environment and thinks someone is behind them and trying to put a shiv on their back.”
Kraft also said that when he was hired by “60 Minutes,” he slowly began to realize that “not everyone was happy that I got this job” because “there were other people who wanted this job.” He added, “Then all of a sudden you have a lot of enemies. A pit of snakes.” In the end, Mr. Kraft said he prefers the job he had before “60 Minutes,” as a correspondent for CBS’s London bureau. “It was the job I always wanted.”
Kraft announced his retirement from “60 Minutes” in 2019 after appearing on the long-running news magazine show in 1989. The award-winning journalist appeared on “60 Minutes” for decades, interviewing celebrities such as President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama.
At the time, Kraft said it was a “difficult decision” to leave the show, but said he had been considering retirement for the past few seasons.
“I want to leave while I still have all my marbles left, while I still have the energy to enjoy life and the curiosity to pursue different things,” he said. “I’ve done nearly 500 stories for this show, which has covered most of my life for the past 30 years.”
In a 2019 “60 Minutes” segment, correspondent Leslie Stahl admitted that she tried to convince Croft not to quit, saying, “People don’t leave this job.” But Mr. Kraft told his former colleagues: “I have always had great respect for those who have left the profession at the top, and I felt now was the time for me to leave.”
Anderson Cooper is another longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent who has also stepped away from his role. In February, Cooper announced that he was leaving the show after nearly 20 years, saying it was becoming difficult to balance his demanding job with his role at CNN while also spending time with his children.
“I’ve been able to balance my work at CNN and CBS, but now that I have young children, I want to spend as much time as possible with them while they still want to spend time with me,” he said.
