The shake-ups at “60 Minutes” took a surprise turn this week when CBS announced that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat would be joining the show. It’s worth asking what it says about our media landscape that CBS is turning its lonely eyes to … Ross Douthat?
It’s no surprise, certainly, that “60 Minutes” added a conservative. The hire, after all, was made by Bari Weiss, who left the Times in 2020 amid internal criticism from her “woke” colleagues. She founded the heterodox new media outlet The Free Press, before going to work for Trump pal David Ellison at CBS News. Maybe Ellison and Weiss have base motives (a desire to win favorable treatment from a Trump administration that decides whether media mergers get approved) or maybe they have admirable ones (a recognition that more ideological diversity is needed in network TV), but whatever the case, they haven’t exactly been secretive in shifting CBS News to the right.
But none of that fully answers the question: Why this conservative in particular? There are a lot of right-of-center media personalities in America today who could theoretically have performed this role. Some of them — many of whom are confirmed Never Trumpers — write for outlets like The Atlantic and The Dispatch. Or if you’re looking to tap into a Trumpier zeitgeist, why not hire Joe Rogan to replace Scott Pelley? Adam Carolla would make a helluva Andy Rooney. Candace Owens has more charisma than almost anybody on TV. But Douthat got the job over all the other possibilities. What might this tell us about the state of the media?
I have a theory, which is that Douthat (whom I know a little) sits at the center of a crucial journalistic Venn diagram: He is an erudite, thoughtful conservative who is still acceptable in Trumpworld, someone who has maintained elite credibility while also defending MAGA ideas. And unless he face-plants at CBS — or American politics changes dramatically in the next few years — I suspect his hiring could be a harbinger: a model for media organizations trying to prove to middle America and the GOP that they are not captured by progressives.
A generation ago, when Douthat and I were starting out as young conservative writers, the career pathways for right-of-center journalists were extremely limited. YouTube and podcasts didn’t exist. You couldn’t just start your own show. There were a handful of conservative outlets (National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the then-new Fox News cable channel) and a few slots for conservatives at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. But that was mostly it.
Not surprisingly, as soon as the technology permitted, conservatives moved to build their own parallel media universe — The Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc. Today, however, conservatives seem to covet control of the same corporate media they once tried to circumvent. This may be partly because Donald Trump has an affinity for elite legacy media, or it may be because most legacy media outlets are no longer as valuable or prestigious as they once were, making them easier to buy or take over. But whatever the reason, the days of conservatives discounting the importance of traditional media seem to be over.
Douthat is the perfect journalist for this moment because he is both mainstream and MAGA-friendly — a somewhat rare combination. He’s way too sophisticated a thinker to be dismissed as a Trump propagandist, but, unlike so many other elite conservative pundits, he’s simply not a Never Trumper. These ideological inclinations have taken him in some insightful directions: His apothegm from 2016 — “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right” — turned out to be one of the most prescient predictions of the Trump era. Other Douthat predictions — “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” written in October 2020 — have, shall we say, aged like milk. And, from my perspective at least, Douthat — who probably sees Trump as vulgar, profane and ignorant — has an unfortunate habit of pooh-poohing warnings about Trump and instead rationalizing why people might support him.
Its merits or lack of merits aside, Douthat’s ideological positioning has presumably been a crucial factor in helping him to land MAGA world guests for his New York Times podcast — people like Vice President JD Vance, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon. In these interviews, he does not come across as either fawning or overly combative. And those conversations have established him as a kind of elite curator and interpreter of the right.
It’s noteworthy to me that Douthat will be a “correspondent” rather than, say, a pundit on some roundtable news-of-the-week discussion. It is axiomatic in politics that the person asking the question is more powerful than the person answering. Even greater power comes from deciding which topics are worthy of coverage or which guests to interview. This is a huge upgrade from the sorts of breadcrumbs that conservatives have traditionally been offered at MSM outlets. Douthat is not, it appears, being hired as a “token conservative” or a “heel” who is just there to provide window dressing while some liberal host bigfoots him. He’s truly on the inside. He’s a decider.
Is all of this a good thing? As Zhou Enlai never actually said about the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to tell.” How things play out will depend largely on the motives behind the hiring of Douthat in the first place.
If the goal is to find somebody with elite credentials to launder MAGA ideas — to normalize authoritarianism, chauvinism and other right-wing toxicity to the public on behalf of Trump and his allies — then that’s a betrayal of both the country and journalism. However, if the goal is to provide some intellectually honest diversity of opinion — which will presumably be tempered by producers, fact-checkers and the existence of other correspondents who hold opposing views — then this could be a great way to counterbalance liberal media bias, and possibly attract a more varied audience.
Regardless, one thing seems very clear to me: If there’s a perception that this experiment is working — if the ratings go up and Douthat’s segments generate positive buzz — then we’re going to see a lot more value placed on finding people like him.
Matt K. Lewis is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.