As CBS seeks to recast 60 Minutes with an agenda more compelling to political conservatives, leaders have recruited one of the most vexing national conservative columnists.
Ross Douthat is a prep-school-educated New Englander who found his way from the Episcopal Church to Pentecostalism and now Catholicism. He’s best known today as a conservative columnist for The New York Times and as host of the podcast “Interesting Times.”
There, and in a number of books, he has written about traditional conservative values that progressives view as too soft on Trumpism and Trump supporters view as not flattering enough of their hero. He recently interviewed Vice President JD Vance on his podcast and pressed him on how he sees the Trump administration as “functionally post-Christian.”
Doug Wilson with Ross Douthat
He also recently stirred the ire of those fighting Christian nationalism by giving a platform to far-right Calvinist pastor Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho.
“Ross is one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy,” said Nick Bilton, the new executive producer at 60 Minutes, hired by Bari Weiss.
It is Weiss who is leading the overhaul of one of the nation’s most-respected TV news programs with a stated intent to make it more conservative and more Trump friendly.
Douthat is one of four new correspondents hired for 60 Minutes to replace the veterans who have left in protest of Weiss and the direction she’s taking the show.
Katie Kingsbury, opinion editor at the Times, said in a memo to her staff that Douthat made the case for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism.”
“He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring,” she said.
Douthat will leave the Times to accept the full-time position at CBS. He and his family live in New Haven, Conn.
As a Harvard-educated conservative, Douthat is sometimes seen as an intellectual face of religious and political conservativism. Others describe him as insufferable for the same reasons.
Fellow journalist Gene Weingarten said of Douthat: “The man is a doctrinaire dispenser of labels who cannot examine a person or principle without attaching to it an abstract ism, then comparing it to another ism, turning everything into a nested taxonomy of political ontogeny. He is something of a gasbag, see?”
Douthat will debut on 60 Minutes Sept. 13, in the opening episode of the show’s 59th season.
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Why is Ross Douthat talking to Doug Wilson? | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy