Rome Hartman is a recently retired 60 Minutes producer. In the spirit of the show’s self-important, solipsistic, navel gazing culture, Hartman let it rip, expressing in his own words what his former colleagues feel but can only express through vicious and poorly veiled leaks to media scribe Oliver Darcy.
In a LinkedIn post (yes, seriously), Hartman explained that Scott Pelley was “damned right” to berate his boss, the newly installed 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, and to tell him that he has thin qualifications for his job.
That’s apparently just another day at the 60 Minutes office. “People have been yelling at each other at 60 Minutes for decades,” he wrote. “I know, because I was there for a lot of the shouting matches. I produced more than 160 segments for 60 Minutes over 25+ years before retiring last year. And spirited conversations among colleagues when talking about really important issues and stories have always been an essential part of making those stories – and the show – better.”
Hartman happens to be the man behind Kamala Harris’s pre-taped October 2024 interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker during which she gave an incoherent answer to a question about Israel. In the edit room, Hartman surgically removed Harris’s word salad and then sutured together Whitaker’s question to a later portion of Harris’s answer, making Harris sound coherent.
We found out because CBS News aired a promotional clip of the excised portion. That was Hartman’s doing too. Columbia Journalism Review captured the fateful moment when Hartman, “in a van hurtling up I-95” after filming the Harris interview, approved a promotional clip of the interview to air on a lesser CBS News broadcast. “Then they got back to work and forgot about it.” The whole affair cost Paramount $16 million.
It was reminiscent of the show’s greatest scandal, Dan Rather’s failed October 2004 attack on George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service based on fraudulent documents, an incident former CBS News president Andrew Heyward described as “the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News.” We have a sneaking suspicion there weren’t too many “spirited conversations” in the 60 Minutes screening room before that one went to air.
The present news coverage of the drama at 60 Minutes, which has repeatedly referred to the program as “fearless” and “fiercely independent,” would have you believe the dismissal of six employees, including two no-name on-camera reporters, the executive producer, and her deputy, somehow surpasses the humiliations delivered on its doorstep by its partisan employees and their theatrics.
The programming for at least the last 10 years has been unoriginal, lazy, and little-watched by the media elites who are suddenly its biggest champions. It has only made news when there has been a scandal related to the bias in its coverage. (Looking at you, Rome Hartman.) The ratings success of the show is due almost entirely to its lead-in: the NFL, by leagues the most watched program on television. CBS could broadcast a Yule log or color bars in that time slot and put up impressive numbers. It can only go up from here—especially if, as Pelley wailed, Bari Weiss intends to “murder” it.
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