Retired 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft has blasted CBS News for firing veteran reporter Scott Pelley and other staff members in a move he called “disastrous” for the show and its audience.

Speaking to Geoff Bennett on PBS NewsHour on Wednesday (June 3), Kroft said, “This is journalistic interference. It makes no business sense whatsoever. It’s the highest-rated news program on television, and it has been that way for more than 50 years.”

Kroft retired from 60 Minutes on May 19, 2019, after 30 seasons on the show. During his tenure, he received three Peabody Awards and nine Emmy Awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement in 2003. However, he believes the show’s future is in jeopardy following the recent upheaval.

“I think it’s been disastrous — for the show, for the audience, which is not insubstantial,” he stated. “It’s been going on a long time.”

Last week, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss announced that the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, would be replaced by tech journalist and filmmaker Nick Bilton. In addition, exec producer Draggan Mihailovich and correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired.

Pelley spoke out against the changes and Weiss’ handling of CBS News during a heated staff meeting on Monday (June 1), during which he said Weiss was “murdering” 60 Minutes and told Bilton he had “slender qualifications” for the job. On Tuesday (June 2), Bilton sent a termination letter to Pelley, noting that he’d been fired “for cause, effective immediately.”

“I think basically 60 Minutes, as the audience has known it, no longer exists,” Kroft said in a separate interview with New York Magazine. “The firings are too substantial.”

He continued, “All of the people involved are very good journalists, and the new management, Bari Weiss and David Ellison [Paramount CEO], have made it clear they want to go to a completely different format, model, call it what you want. They thought that what 60 Minutes was doing had become outdated and old and musty and needed to be changed, in spite of the fact that the audience has gone up 9 percent in the last year.”

Kroft traced the changes back to the lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CBS News over a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which the president claimed was edited with bias. Last July, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to Trump as part of a settlement. While many legal experts agreed the claims were baseless, the lawsuit was taken seriously, in part, because Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media required government approval.

“There was the intimidation factor,” Kroft told NY Mag. “People had become extremely nervous about what kinds of stories they could suggest, what kinds of stories they could work on, and how any story that would be critical of the Trump administration would face major obstacles to getting on the air.”