The CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes isn’t just television’s longest continually running primetime series — it has also been the top U.S. news program for more than 50 years and won more Emmy Awards than any other primetime series, as its network touts.

That legacy is not without controversy, however. Many times in its five-plus-decade history, the program has gone from reporting the news to becoming the news. Here are our picks for the ten biggest 60 Minutes controversies…

10. Racial bias story

A 2021 60 Minutes segment covered how facial recognition technologies had led to the wrongful arrests of Black men, but producers only gave airtime to white experts, The Washington Post reported. In a petition about the segment, the Algorithmic Justice League said the piece “deliberately excluded the groundbreaking and award-winning work of prominent Black women AI researchers Joy Buolamwini, Dr. Timnit Gebru, and Inioluwa Deborah Raji.”

Buolamwini said she spent hours working on the segment with 60 Minutes producers. “In almost every facet of our lives, from technology to government and social movements, Black women are often assumed to be available and best equipped to do the hard work of moving an issue forward, and at the same time are not given the recognition for doing so,” Buolamwini told the Post.

An editor’s note from CBS News claimed 60 Minutes told the story “clearly and fairly” and said the news organization was “very grateful to the dozens of sources — off and on camera — who helped us develop and focus this segment but were not mentioned by name.”

9. Werner Erhard allegations

A 1991 segment about Werner Erhard was bad press for the so-called “father of self-help”: As the show reported, Erhard’s daughter Celeste had accused him of molestation, and the IRS had accused him of tax fraud. Afterward, Celeste said she’d been offered a financial incentive to make the allegations, and the IRS retracted its claim and ultimately paid Erhard $200,000 after he filed suit, according to The Believer.

“My reputation was destroyed by 60 Minutes,” Erhard told The New York Times in 2015.

Furthermore, The Believer reported, the segment had so many factual discrepancies, CBS replaced the transcript of the segment with a disclaimer stating the segment “has been deleted at the request of CBS News for legal or copyright reasons.”

If you or someone you know is the victim of child abuse, contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453). If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

8. Forged U.S. Customs memo

In 1998, 60 Minutes issued a mea culpa about a 1997 segment about the smuggling of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, California. The segment featured a memo purportedly written by Rudy Camacho, a San Diego district director of the U.S. Customs Service, instructing agents to expedite the processing of trucks owned by a company associated with Mexican drug cartels, per The Washington Post.

However, the Customs Service in Washington D.C. determined the memo to be fake. One-time U.S. Customs officer Mike Horner admitted he had forged it, per the San Diego Reader, and a lawsuit filed by Camacho resulted in a settlement that mandated 60 Minutes’ on-air apology. “We have concluded that we were deceived, and ultimately so were you, our viewers,” 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl said on the program in 1998.

7. Jeep and Audi safety concerns

A 1980 60 Minutes segment reported that Jeep’s CJ-5 had a high rollover risk, with footage from rollover tests of the vehicle. In actuality, testers only logged eight rollovers out of 435 runs and had hung weights on the sides of the Jeep, not visible on camera, per the National Review.

Then, in 1986, a 60 Minutes segment covered allegations that Audi’s 5000 sedan was prone to suddenly accelerate — and that report included footage of the 500 doing just that. Some Audi 5000 owners had sued the company, and eventually, a consultant for plaintiffs’ lawyers disclosed he had fiddled with the sedan’s transmission for the 60 Minutes footage, per The Wall Street Journal. Furthermore, a 1989 government study found the accelerations were mostly driver error. Even so, Audi’s U.S. sales took 15 years to recover, according to the newspaper.

6. Timothy McVeigh interview

In 2000, Ed Bradley interviewed convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on death row for a 60 Minutes interview that proved polarizing. “I think there were people who wrote in and said, ‘How can you give this guy a platform, to spew that venom?’And to just sit there, the way you would interview someone else,’” Bradley later told Larry King.

“And then, there was other mail — including mail from people who lost loved ones, family, friends, in the Oklahoma City bombing — who said, ‘Thank you for helping to give us some closure in seeing who this guy is, how he thinks, and how he talks because they didn’t really [see that] at the trial.’”

5. Benghazi report

60 Minutes had to discredit its own reporting in 2013 following a segment focusing on the account of an ex-security officer named Dylan Davies, who claimed to have raced to the scene and engaged attackers during the attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, in which a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead. Davies gave a different account to the FBI, and CBS News had to issue a retraction.

The executive director of standards and practices at CBS News declared the 60 Minutes team had not vetted Davies’ account of his actions and whereabouts adequately. Another issue was that Davies was writing a book for Simon & Schuster, which was a subsidiary of the CBS Corporation at the time. Lara Logan, who presented the segment on 60 Minutes, apologized on CBS This Morning for the mistakes, and she and a segment producer were asked to take leaves of absence.

4. Sexual misconduct scandals

In a 2018 report, investigators hired by the CBS Corporation’s board of directors determined that 60 Minutes didn’t stop inappropriate conduct by creator Don Hewitt or successor Jeff Fager, according to The New York Times.

Fager had recently been fired from his post as 60 Minutes executive producer after sending a threatening text to a CBS reporter inquiring about allegations of inappropriate behavior against him. The board’s investigators determined Fager’s firing was justified, specifying that he “engaged in certain acts of sexual misconduct” with colleagues and failed to stop other colleagues’ misbehavior.

The investigators also found that CBS was still paying out a settlement to a woman who had alleged that Hewitt repeatedly assaulted her and that he destroyed her career. The network agreed to pay her more than $5 million.

If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual assault, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network‘s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

3. Killian documents

Four CBS News employees lost their jobs in 2005 after an independent panel concluded the news organization failed to follow basic journalistic principles for a 2004 60 Minutes Wednesday segment about then-President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, as CBS News reported at the time.

That segment presented documents purportedly written by the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, one of Bush’s Texas Air National Guard commanders in the early 1970s, saying that the eventual president disobeyed an order to submit to a physical exam and that friends of his family tried to sugarcoat his service in the National Guard.

The authenticity of the documents came into question — with suspicion they were prepared on a modern word processor — and the panel concluded that CBS News didn’t adequately authenticate the documents or investigate their source. Dan Rather, who reported the story for 60 Minutes Wednesday, soon stepped down from anchoring the CBS Evening News.

2. Trump lawsuit and fallout

In 2024, Donald Trump sued 60 Minutes for $20 billion, alleging that the news program had edited an interview with Democratic challenger Kamala Harris to give her an edge, according to the Associated Press. CBS News denied the allegations and released the full transcript of the interview with Harris, who ended up losing the 2024 presidential election to Trump. But Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, reportedly sought to settle the lawsuit ahead of a merger with Skydance Media that would need federal approval, the AP added.

In April 2025, 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens announced his resignation from the program. “It has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience,” he told staffers in a memo.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley mentioned the off-screen shake-up on air days later. “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it,” he said. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires. No one here is happy about it.”

And in a CNN interview this month, Pelley said a settlement between Paramount and Trump and an apology from Paramount would “be very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies.”

1. Brown & Williamson story

As retold in the Academy Award-nominated film The Insider, 60 Minutes put the brakes on a 1995 segment about Jeffrey Wigand, former director of research for Brown & Williamson, which was then the United States’ third-largest tobacco company. Wigand told 60 Minutes B&W knew its product was addictive, even though the company’s chief executive had said otherwise in Congress testimony. “We’re a nicotine delivery business,” Wigand told interviewer Mike Wallace.

The issue, as CBS News later reported, was that CBS lawyers feared the segment would trigger a multibillion-dollar lawsuit since Wigand had a confidentiality agreement with B&W — and, as The New York Times reported in an opinion, CBS was navigating a $5.4 billion merger deal with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. CBS ordered 60 Minutes not to run the story, and the network only aired the interview the following year after The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on Wigand.

“The story itself was one of the most — probably the most important story that was ever reported by 60 Minutes. It was just mishandled,” Fager later said. “It was a low point in our history, and it wasn’t, I think, anybody’s fault at the broadcast. 60 Minutes was under incredible pressure from the corporation.”

The Times opinion added, “This act of self-censorship by the country’s most powerful and aggressive television news program sends a chilling message to journalists investigating industry practices everywhere.”