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At Roiled CBS, Journalists Wonder What Comes Next

NEW YORK — For decades, the headquarters of CBS News and the offices of “60 Minutes” have stood on opposite sides of a windswept block of Manhattan’s West 57th Street.

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By
John Koblin
and
Michael M. Grynbaum, New York Times

NEW YORK — For decades, the headquarters of CBS News and the offices of “60 Minutes” have stood on opposite sides of a windswept block of Manhattan’s West 57th Street.

It was a symbolic divide as much as a physical one. And these days the gap between the two might as well be miles wide.

The ouster Wednesday of Jeff Fager, the 63-year-old “60 Minutes” executive producer, after he threatened the career of a CBS reporter who was looking into harassment allegations against him has exacerbated tensions between the House of Cronkite and its most popular, most profitable show.

Populated by eminences like Steve Kroft and Lesley Stahl, the weekly newsmagazine prides itself on a culture of exceptionalism — with the ratings to back it up. No matter if CBS News is having a good or a bad year — and there have been plenty of bad ones — “60 Minutes” performs.

“The people at ’60 Minutes’ were paid more, they had longer time to work on stories, they got incredible recognition in terms of ratings and prestige, so naturally the people in the trenches would sometimes be resentful of that,” said Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president. “It was like a hit TV show that happened to be at CBS News.” The show keeps its footage on a separate server inaccessible to other CBS News employees. When the network wants to broadcast a newsworthy clip from “60 Minutes,” producers must include the show’s onscreen watermark — as it if it were a rival station.

Even the contrast in office space tells a tale. The CBS Broadcast Center is a 1950s-era hulk, lamented by some employees for its windowless rooms. “60 Minutes” operates out of the sleek BMW Building, with panoramic views of the Hudson River.

David Rhodes, the 44-year-old CBS News president, who fired Fager, is virtually unknown to much of the “60 Minutes” staff, which effectively operated under Fager’s sole authority. Officials on both sides of the news division say Rhodes now faces a daunting task: winning over a shocked team that is worried about its future and responsible for the crown jewel in the CBS News lineup.

All of this has happened days after CBS’ chief executive, Leslie Moonves, stepped down while facing allegations of sexual misconduct. The 51st season of “60 Minutes” premieres in a little over two weeks. And two law firms are still investigating the workplace culture at CBS, as well as at “60 Minutes.”

“Nobody is surprised by the solidarity that was shown by everyone on the floor yesterday,” Bill Owens, the interim executive producer and Fager’s longtime No. 2, wrote in a staffwide email Thursday morning. “'60 Minutes’ is a collection of superb journalists but we are also as close to a family as any group can be.”

In its half-century on the air, however, “60 Minutes” has never been at home within the larger CBS News family.

A 2017 book on the show’s history — written by Fager, after he stymied another author who was asking questions about the show’s treatment of women — noted that a feeling of independence permeated the place. “The rituals and obsessions of most every other television news organization, including our own CBS News organization, did not matter so much,” Fager wrote.

On Thursday, according to multiple people who work at the show, the mood inside the “60 Minutes” offices remained tense.

The animating concern was whether Rhodes, perceived by the show’s staff as more of a technocrat than a reporter, planned to wrest control and finally fold the show into the news organization. Many “60 Minutes” veterans fear that such a move would amount to dismantling their institution. The chilliness is all the more notable considering Fager hired Rhodes from Bloomberg News in 2011. When Fager announced that he was relinquishing the CBS News chairman role in late 2014, Rhodes described Fager as “a great mentor and a close friend.”

Rhodes so rarely visits the “60 Minutes” office that one staff member likened his appearance there Wednesday, to discuss Fager’s firing, to the sighting of a unicorn. Likewise, “60 Minutes” officials are infrequent attendees at Rhodes’ editorial meetings for senior producers every Monday morning. So when he did show up, many staff members reacted in anger.

Fager has been accused of touching women at company parties and allowing harassment to go unchecked inside “60 Minutes,” allegations that he denies. But at an impromptu toast on Wednesday at an Upper West Side bar, Fager was hugged by teary-eyed employees, dismayed by his sudden departure.

A few blocks away, their colleagues at “CBS Evening News” were preparing a damning segment — about Fager, and the threat that he had leveled against a network reporter, Jericka Duncan.

“Be careful,” Fager wrote to Duncan, in a text message shown on Wednesday’s newscast. “There are people who lost their jobs trying to harm me.”

Jeff Glor, the “CBS Evening News” anchor, who was once close to Fager, told Duncan on the air that everyone at the newscast “supports you 100 percent.” Glor ad-libbed his comment, according to a person familiar with the broadcast, which was taken as a sign of network unity in denouncing Fager’s actions.

Still, the rancor at “60 Minutes” toward Rhodes had subsided somewhat Thursday after staff members learned the exact words that Fager had used in his threat.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, told The New York Times before Wednesday’s newscast that she did “not understand how you get fired over a text message.” By Thursday, after looking at the text message, she said: “I was stunned. It was very upsetting.”

Likewise, Kroft, the veteran correspondent, told The Times that the text was “threatening and inappropriate.”

Owens, the interim boss, has the enthusiastic support of the “60 Minutes” rank-and-file, but names of possible permanent replacements for Fager are now circulating. With two active investigations into sexual harassment at CBS, some wonder if the network will look outside its walls for Fager’s permanent successor. But there is also skepticism about whether an outsider can successfully wrangle a place as idiosyncratic — and valuable to the brand — as “60 Minutes.”

The list includes Susan Zirinsky, the well-respected “48 Hours” executive producer who inspired Holly Hunter’s character in the 1987 film “Broadcast News,” and Tanya Simon, a producer at “60 Minutes” and the daughter of Bob Simon, the longtime correspondent who died in 2015. As Rhodes works to move an old-school series into a modern media age, he might reconsider his methods of communication.

On Monday, a day after Moonves was fired, Rhodes sent a message to the news division on Slack — an instant-messaging system used by many contemporary media companies — talking about next steps.

“These are terrible stories to read and yet, if you were hoping to make changes to our culture, there aren’t many changes bigger than the ones underway,” Rhodes wrote. “Change at the top of the whole company offers a fresh start for all of us.”

But few employees at “60 Minutes,” where several correspondents are in their 60s and 70s, saw the note Monday. According to the show’s staff members, most of them do not use Slack.

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