60 Minutes

Overview

60 Minutes is the longest-running primetime news program in American television — on CBS since September 24, 1968 — but in late 2025 it made news less for what it broadcast than for what it left out (Editor & Publisher). When correspondent Norah O’Donnell interviewed Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence, about 28 minutes aired on the November 2 episode. CBS also posted a 73-minute extended cut and the full transcript online (Poynter). And it is the comparison of those three versions that became the story: two exchanges present in the transcript were missing from both video versions. The first was O’Donnell pressing Trump on the apparent conflict of interest behind his pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao — whose company had struck a $2 billion deal with the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial (Al Jazeera). The second was Trump bragging on camera that “60 Minutes” had been “forced to pay me — a lot of money” over the Kamala Harris interview (Poynter). Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, filed a formal complaint with CBS News’ newly installed ombudsman, writing that Trump “increasingly appears to be exercising direct control over CBS’s editorial decisions” (Poynter).

The program

The show was the invention of television producer Don Hewitt, who joined CBS News in 1948 and had produced the first televised presidential debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, in 1960 (Editor & Publisher). Hewitt’s pitch was a television version of Life magazine: an hour mixing hard investigations with interviews and features, where entertainers could share a broadcast with probes into corporate wrongdoing (Editor & Publisher). The debut, on a Tuesday night in 1968 and anchored by Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, was an eclectic grab bag — coverage of the Nixon-Humphrey campaigns, an interview with the U.S. attorney general, commentary from journalists and writers, a portion of the Oscar-winning short Why Man Creates — and the now-famous ticking stopwatch wasn’t in it yet (AMAC). Success didn’t arrive at once: the show aired every other Tuesday at 10 p.m. and struggled until it found its Sunday evening home in 1975 (AMAC).

What followed made it the industry standard for TV newsmagazines. Under Hewitt’s 36-year run, the show won 73 Emmy Awards, 13 DuPont/Columbia University Awards and nine Peabody Awards, and became the only news program ever to finish a season as television’s top-rated show — which it did four times, most recently in 1992–93 (Editor & Publisher). Its correspondents — Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer and the rest — became figures the powerful dreaded hearing from, and the program regularly made its own news: a presidential candidate answering infidelity questions in 1992, Al Gore announcing he wouldn’t run in 2004 (Editor & Publisher). It also aired material that ignited national arguments, like the 1998 tape of Dr. Jack Kevorkian lethally injecting a patient, which set off a debate on euthanasia and on what a TV news show should do (Editor & Publisher). Hewitt stepped down after the 2003–04 season and died in 2009; Bari Weiss is now editor-in-chief of CBS News (Editor & Publisher; Poynter).

The Mar-a-Lago interview and what didn’t air

The O’Donnell interview, filmed at Mar-a-Lago the Friday before it aired, covered the topics a president expects to be asked about: the government shutdown, Xi Jinping and Taiwan, the resumption of nuclear testing, Venezuela, tariffs, the ICE crackdowns and the New York mayoral race (Al Jazeera). The friction came in the exchange that exists only in the transcript. Asked why he had pardoned Zhao the previous month, Trump said, “I don’t know who he is” — that he had never met him, and had been told Zhao was the victim of a “witch hunt” by the Biden administration (Al Jazeera). Zhao had pleaded guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering on his platform, served four months in prison until September 2024, and stepped down as Binance chief executive (Al Jazeera). Meanwhile his company was entwined with the Trump family’s crypto business: World Liberty Financial, the venture of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, had launched its dollar-pegged USD1 coin on Binance’s blockchain in March 2025, and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX had used $2 billion worth of that stablecoin to buy a stake in Binance (Al Jazeera).

When O’Donnell put that conflict-of-interest question directly to him, Trump turned defensive: “I can’t say, because — I can’t say — I’m not concerned. I don’t — I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it” (Poynter). That whole exchange was omitted from both the 28-minute broadcast and the 73-minute extended online video (Poynter). CBS’s public explanation for the trims was a note on the YouTube version saying the video was “condensed for clarity” (Al Jazeera). Trump’s on-camera claim that “‘60 Minutes’ was forced to pay me — a lot of money because they took (Vice President Harris’) answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing” met the same fate: transcript only, neither video (Poynter).

The complaint

Raskin’s letter went to CBS News ombudsman Kenneth Weinstein — a role the network created only after Skydance and CEO David Ellison acquired Paramount and took over CBS News in late summer 2025 (Poynter). Raskin argued the timing of the cuts mattered as much as their content: the interview aired exactly one year after Trump’s lawyers sued Paramount over the Harris interview, and the network’s parent company had just secured federal approval for the Skydance merger from Trump’s administration (Poynter; Al Jazeera). His framing drew a deliberate line: “It is one thing for CBS to make independent editorial decisions protected by the First Amendment. It is quite another to make edits at the President’s demand out of fear of retribution” (Poynter). Whether the ombudsman has answered, and what CBS’s internal account of the edits is, is not yet on the record.

The $16 million backstory

The money Trump bragged about came from the lawsuit his lawyers filed in October 2024 over the pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. CBS had aired two different versions of Harris’s answer to a question on Israel’s war in Gaza — one on 60 Minutes with Bill Whitaker, another on Face the Nation — and Trump claimed the network distorted its broadcasts to help her campaign, initially seeking $10 billion and raising it to $20 billion in February 2025 (Al Jazeera). In July 2025 Paramount settled for $16 million, structured as a donation to a planned Trump presidential library, without apologizing for the editing (Al Jazeera). The figure was picked with care: it mirrored ABC’s December 2024 concession to Trump, chosen partly out of concern that a larger payout would invite shareholders to call it a bribe — a concern Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders raised anyway, floating a hearing on whether the settlement amounted to one (IPI Media).

The settlement landed in a newsroom already in turmoil. 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence, and CBS News president Wendy McMahon was forced out (IPI Media). The merger that had loomed over all of it — Skydance, controlled by David Ellison, son of the Trump-backing tech billionaire — then won FCC approval, putting the network under new ownership (IPI Media). For a program whose relationship with Trump had already included him walking out of a 2020 interview with Lesley Stahl and calling her “biased,” the November 2025 broadcast was less a fresh start than the next chapter (Al Jazeera).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not claim CBS admitted the edits were made at Trump’s request; CBS’s only public explanation is the “condensed for clarity” note on the extended video.
• It does not report any response from ombudsman Kenneth Weinstein to Raskin’s complaint — no response is sourced.
• It does not assert that the Binance pardon involved a conflict of interest as a fact; it reports only that O’Donnell asked about its appearance and that the exchange was cut from both video versions.
• It states the pardon happened in October 2025, the only dating a fully-read source supports; the exact date was not verified.
• It makes no claim about Bari Weiss’s role in the specific edit decisions — only that she is CBS News’ editor-in-chief.
• A companion profile, 60 Minutes (CBS News), covers the same program through a different lens: the October 2025 interview with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about the Hamas meeting and the Gaza ceasefire.