On Monday, while CBS News was taking the irregular step of acquiescing to a Federal Communications Commission request for the unedited footage and transcript of Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, the show’s executive producer was fervently trying to defend the network’s integrity, and his own. In an all-hands meeting, Bill Owens acknowledged that CBS was complying with F.C.C. demands, but asserted that he would not apologize for the editing discrepancy at the heart of the federal inquiry: the fact that 60 Minutes and Face the Nation each aired different portions of the vice president’s remarks. “The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done,” he said. “The edit is perfectly fine. Let’s put that to bed so we can get on with our lives.” Owens’s remarks hardly calmed the waters at CBS, where employees are still quietly rebelling against owner Shari Redstone’s plan to settle the lawsuit that President Trump brought against the network over the interview. As I reported last week, Shari has privately determined that a low-eight-figure gift to the Trump Presidential Library is a small price to pay to close her tortured $8 billion sale of Paramount. On the other hand, as I also noted, there’s no guarantee that Shari’s capitulation will buy any less scrutiny of the sale. (My partner Eriq Gardner offered a similar assessment yesterday, with characteristic acuity.) Maybe that explains why she hasn’t settled yet, but my latest intel tells me she still wants to put this to bed. In any event, Owens’s remarks triggered mixed emotions among the 60 Minutes anchors and correspondents in the room and, eventually, journalists across CBS News. On the one hand, everyone at the network, all the way up to CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon, opposes the settlement and views it as a gross incursion on press freedom. Some in Monday’s meeting discussed issuing public statements or even resigning, though both Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper advised their colleagues against such dramatic steps. (Anderson candidly posited that, in today’s media landscape, there were few other places, if any, where they could go and produce similar work.) Some interpreted Owens’s remark as a dare to the parentco to fire him, which might then catalyze an actual rebellion. At the same time, not everyone at the network necessarily concurs with Owens’s declaration about “the edit.” Even as they direct their ire toward Shari, many CBS News insiders are also frustrated with Owens for leaving them vulnerable to this situation in the first place. “Is the edit fine?” one CBS News insider asked rhetorically. “It’s obviously an unforced error.” Several sources said the discrepancy was preventable, and argued that Owens and 60 Minutes should have taken greater care to ensure consistency between the two interview clips, especially given the high stakes of the presidential election and the scrutiny at the time on Harris’s performance in interviews. In any case, folks can make their own judgments, since both F.C.C. chairman Brendan Carr and 60 Minutes made the raw footage and transcript public on Wednesday. Carr also said that the F.C.C. would open a docket to take public comments on the matter—a move that could set approval of the merger back, depending on how long the F.C.C. decides to keep the controversy alive. (Yet another punitive measure that suggests Shari won’t necessarily get deal approval by copping to a shakedown.) According to the F.C.C. website, the comment period will be open through March 24, but that doesn’t mean the docket will close then. As Eriq told me, the F.C.C. opened a case on Fox News’s Philadelphia license in August 2023 that didn’t close for 18 months.

Meanwhile, the stress around the settlement has stoked all manner of latent anxieties. In October, when the Harris interview aired and this was still a mere micro-scandal, CBS News sources told me they saw the controversy as evidence that the Tiffany network was losing its way as it continued to downsize. McMahon had recently expanded Owens’s remit to include Evening News, and staff feared he would become overextended. In a round of layoffs shortly before the 60 scandal, the network laid off Jen DePriest, one of the veteran lawyers responsible for—wait for it—reviewing transcripts in order to ensure the integrity of the broadcast. As you might imagine, all those anxieties came back to the fore this week. On some level, these anxieties reflect the blind spots and myopia of television journalists. To scapegoat leadership, organizational changes, or cost-cutting exercises in the legal department is to miss the larger drama, which is that CBS News is a fading division in a fading network within a fading company. Half a century ago, Walter Cronkite might have had the leverage to sway the outcome of such a high-profile contretemps with the White House; in Monday’s meeting, Pelley told his colleagues that any public displays of protest would be moot, since Trump would almost certainly reframe the narrative to his benefit. Owens and McMahon may disagree with a settlement in principle, but they hardly have the heft or sway to stop Shari and the board. And, frankly, they probably prize their jobs and salaries too much to offer any sort of profile in courage. Meanwhile, Owens’s preoccupation with his own response to Trump seems to miss the fact that the real apology gets written on a check. Sure, internal protest beats the alternative, but at the end of the day, no one at CBS has done anything more than bitch and moan on background.