Anderson Cooper is leaving 60 Minutes after nearly 20 years as an Emmy-winning correspondent for the CBS News program.
Cooper confirmed the news of his exit in a statement to Entertainment Weekly on Monday.
“Being a correspondent at 60 Minutes has been one of the great honors of my career,” Cooper said. “I got to tell amazing stories and work with some of the best producers, editors, and camera crews in the business. For nearly 20 years, I’ve been able to balance my jobs at CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now, and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me.”
Cooper started on 60 Minutes in 2006. His final segment was a story on Ken Burns that aired on Sunday. The journalist had been juggling his role as a full-time anchor at CNN with his reporting duties for the long-running, hour-long program.
Bari Weiss, Anderson Cooper
Noam Galai/Getty; Michael Loccisano/Getty
Cooper’s exit marks the latest shakeup at CBS News since former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss became editor-in-chief in October. Under the direction of new owner David Ellison, the son of conservative billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, bought Weiss’s independent news publication, The Free Press, for $150 million, handing her the reins of CBS News shortly thereafter.
The month before, Paramount buckled to Trump in a $16 million suit over a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which the President alleged was edited to swing the election in her favor.
In the months since Weiss took over, she has already sparked controversy, with the network announcing in December that it wouldn’t air a planned segment covering the stories of Venezuelan men deported out of the U.S. by the Trump administration and taken to a notorious El Salvador maximum-security prison.
In an email to fellow correspondents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, longtime 60 Minutes employee Sharyn Alfonsi accused the move of “corporate censorship” and said Weiss “spiked our story” in a decision she deemed political, not an editorial call.
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The segment eventually aired four weeks later. It had not been changed from the original report, and no Trump administration official was interviewed.
Weiss defended her decision in a statement to outlets, saying, “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
Weiss’s tenure at the network has also been marked by staffing shakeups. Last week, CBS News producer Alicia Hastey announced her exit with a fiery memo, which a New York Times reporter later posted on X late Wednesday. “There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” Hastey wrote.
Hastey is among 11 CBS Evening News staffers, out of 40, who have reportedly accepted buyouts offered in late January, according to multiple outlets.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly