Conservative Catholic writer Ross Douthat has been hired as a 60 Minutes correspondent in the latest major shakeup from MAGA-curious CBS News boss Bari Weiss.
Nick Bilton, the 49-year-old TV news virgin whom Weiss hired as the show’s executive producer, announced that Douthat—another TV news virgin—will attempt to fill the shoes of fired correspondents Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, as well as Anderson Cooper, who did not renew his contract.
“Ross is one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy,” Bilton said.
“A Ross interview—and he’s interviewed on camera Vice President Vance, Dario Amodei, Amy Coney Barrett, Hasan Piker and Ben Sasse among others—is a special conversation, expansive and probing and news-making,“ Bilton continued.
“In nearly two decades at The New York Times, and in his work at The Atlantic before that, and in seven books, Ross has tackled politics, religion and culture-and what his own struggle with Lyme disease taught him about suffering. He makes controversial topics approachable and renders characters and points of view with richness and compassion. Ross will bring this big and ranging curiosity to our air.”
Weiss, 42, said on X that she “couldn’t be more excited” for Douthat and company’s arrival. Also joining 60 Minutes as contributors are Sebastian Junger, Gianna Toboni and Trevor Phillips.
Junger, 64, is a long-form documentarian who, despite winning multiple awards for his work, has no experience in short-form television news. Like Bilton, he is a former Vanity Fair writer.
Phillips, a British writer and former U.K. politician, was named senior global affairs correspondent for CBS News last month. He previously hosted the Sky News program “Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips.” The 72-year-old has been accused of making Islamophobic comments. He is also a close friend of the disgraced British politician Peter Mandelson, who was revealed in the Epstein files to have passed the pedophile financier insider information, and to have continued his relationship after Epstein’s conviction of child sex offenses.
Phillips told The Brink podcast in February that he remains friends with Mandelson, Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S., despite his links to Epstein, the sex trafficking pedophile.
Arguing that nobody is “perfect,” Phillips said he had “absolutely no time” for people who had deserted Mandelson after the U.S. Justice Department’s Epstein files dump revealed he had corresponded closely with Epstein years after the pedophile’s conviction for soliciting a child for sex.
Toboni, 39, is a former VICE News producer and correspondent who has directed short-form documentaries.
While the quintet of hires was announced the same day, most attention was on Douthat. Times Opinion Editor Katie Kingsbury praised him for making “arguments so carefully built that even readers who arrived hostile stayed to see how they’d hold up.”
“He made the case for a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism that never needed an enemy to define itself against,” Kingsbury wrote in a staff memo, according to the Times media reporter Ben Mullin. “He wrote about decadence and renewal, about the Catholic Church he loves and challenges in equal measure, about the populist right he understood before most of us had a name for it.”
Douthat, who has five children with his wife, Abigail, joined the Times as a columnist in 2009, and for the past year hosted the Opinion section podcast Interesting Times. He converted to Catholicism when he was 17, when he was a student at an exclusive boarding school, then studied at Harvard. He began his career in 2001, working for the conservative National Review, at the time best known for cheerleading the Iraq war. While there he wrote its “Iraq Watch” column, ridiculing critics of the neo-conservative drive to invade Iraq.
He ended up at the Times where he was a colleague of Weiss. Douthat, like Weiss, has never been a news reporter.
He has written seven books, the latest being 2025’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.
In a talk last year at the Society of Catholic Scientists, Douthat said his book was not about there being “one slam dunk argument that absolutely proves once and forever the existence of God.” Rather, it “tries to...portray reality as offering...three converging lines, three converging fact patterns for which a religious perspective on the world—a perspective that says mind precedes matter, that there is intentionality behind the cosmos, and that intentionality had us in mind in some important way, that human beings exist for a reason and are part of the purpose of the cosmos even if we don’t know fully what that purpose is."
Douthat has not yet commented publicly on his upcoming role at 60 Minutes. The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment. A Times spokesperson referred to Kingsbury’s memo.
