Start the stopwatch. 60 Minutes will have to do a story on itself this Sunday.
CBS News today announced that longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager is leaving the company “effective immediately,” amid allegations of inappropriate behavior.
“Bill Owens will manage the 60 Minutes team as Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews and I begin the search for a new executive producer of the program,” CBS News president David Rhodes said in a statement.
A New Yorker article in August implicated Fager, along with former CBS CEO Les Moonves, in a series of allegations of sexual misconduct at the company.
Moonves stepped down from his position earlier this week. There are questions of whether his wife, Big Brother and The Talk host Julie Chen, could also soon be leaving.
Fager, 63, has been at CBS News for 36 years and has been a leading figure at the news division for decades. He joined the network in 1982 after a short stint at WBZ, the CBS station in Boston. He was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather for a few years in the mid-1990s. But his most significant contribution has been to 60 Minutes. He is only the second executive producer of the broadcast, taking over from creator Don Hewitt in 2004.
Fager had significant support at the broadcast, where much of the leadership team under him are women. Many believed that what he’s accused of pales in comparison to the allegations against Moonves and the newsmen who have been caught up in the #MeToo movement, including Charlie Rose, whom Fager hired for multiple roles.