Steve Kroft was a 60 Minutes correspondent from 1989 to 2019, meaning he spent three decades in a job he detested, as he recently revealed to Bill O’Reilly.
In a new interview on O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast, Kroft said he “hated” working at the CBS newsmagazine and wouldn’t join the show again if he did it all over.
The veteran journalist said that before he joined the show, 60 Minutes was a “really appealing” job prospect he wasn’t sure he’d ever land. And after he got the job, he experienced how grueling the work was.
“The job is just 24 hours a day,” he said. “I mean, you may get a couple hours of bad sleep. Beepers going off, getting on jets, going here and there, the whole thing. Then coming back and spending three or four days writing the script, and then going to the screenings and then getting on, and starting it all over again.”
Then there was the professional jealously for which Kroft was on the receiving end, as he explained. “I can remember when I was tapped to go to 60 Minutes, I thought this was fantastic, and I expected a lot of people would just come up and say, ‘That’s really great, I’m really happy for you,’” he said. “And then you realize after a while that not everybody was happy that I got this job. There were other people that wanted it. And so then, you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies. And it’s a snake pit.”
And by his own admission, Kroft wasn’t the best version of himself during those long hours at 60 Minutes. When O’Reilly asked about how Kroft’s former producers would describe him, the ex-correspondent replied, “I think if you asked them during the scripting process, the answer would be unprintable. When the story is finished and screened, they would be more complimentary. I’m not easy.”
It wasn’t all bad, though. “It was exhilarating in the sense that the reason I loved the job was because of the stories that I could do, and the fact that they liked good stories,” Kroft said.
60 Minutes has been rocked by tumult recently, with high-profile talent shakeups and the $16 million parent company Paramount agreed to pay to Donald Trump last summer to settle a lawsuit regarding the newsmagazine.
When asked about the atmosphere at 60 Minutes during his July 2025 appearance on The Daily Show, Kroft said, “Devastating’s a good word. I think there’s a lot of fear over there. Fear of losing their job, fear of what’s happening to the country, fear of losing the First Amendment, all of those things.”
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