CBS’ Scott Pelley, On Why 60 Minutes Is ‘More Relevant, More Important Today’ Than Ever In Its History

As many as ten trains a day arrive at platform four of the railway station in Przemyśl, Poland. Eight miles or so from the Ukranian border, it’s the same scene, over and over again. A line of railcars rumbles to a stop. Then the windows start sliding down, as passengers inside who’ve fled Vladimir Putin’s invasion accept bottles of water offered from the volunteers reaching up to them from below. Border guards and police officers pick up any small children inside and, in a gentle swoop, set them down on the landing at the bottom of the stairs.

After being packed into what’s often a standing room only space for the better part of a day, this is the end of the line for several thousand passengers. Most of whom are women and children, since men of fighting age aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine by presidential decree. After disembarking, some of them look around for a corner of this nineteenth-century train station where they can sleep for a little while. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley told me about speaking with a woman from one of the trains, who had tears in her eyes. She’d seen Polish people waving from their homes as her train passed by. “It’s wonderful,” she told Pelley, about the response from volunteers at platform number four.

“We try to tell human stories,” Pelley told me on a recent afternoon, while on his way to the airport to depart for a 60 Minutes reporting trip to Ukraine. “Like this enormous, momentous story that we told a couple of weeks ago, just from a single train platform in Poland. About the people who were getting off the evacuation trains.

“I was just looking at that scene and thinking to myself, what’s the thread here? How do we tell this story? And it occurred to me that we should focus it right down to this one common denominator. Platform four, at the Przemyśl train station.”

For a TV newsmagazine like 60 Minutes, which can feel like a bit of an anachronism in a broadcast news landscape over-filled with hot takes and talking heads, that’s the storytelling formula in microcosm. Use the small, to help viewers understand the whole.

The weekly program has aired for over 50 seasons now, and under the leadership of executive producer Bill Owens the 60 Minutes reporting teams put together what end up feeling more like mini-documentaries than straightforward TV news packages. The stories, the slices of life captured therein, the interviews with and profiles of newsmakers — each segment gets 12 minutes or so across the broadcast. Unhurried journalism that, for the show, has also translated into a streak of ratings leadership over the last four weeks.

According to the Nielsen live plus same day ratings through Sunday, March 20, 60 Minutes was the #1 primetime program in viewership for the fourth week in a row — drawing a little over 9 million viewers. Moreover, 60 Minutes finished as a top five broadcast 13 times out of 22 airings this season.

“I think people tune in on Sundays, because they expect to see and hear something they haven’t heard through the week,” Owens told me. “Something that’s a little deeper. The storytelling is really — I mean, we spend a lot of time on our writing and clearly the storytelling.”

Continues Owens: “What I hope, on our best day, is that people come away feeling a little bit smarter and have a little better handle on what’s happening around them, in these uncertain times. The more information, context, nuance, that people can absorb, the better. We don’t ever want to do a story about an event, per se. We want to tell a story that has to do with the event.”

60 Minutes’ “Platform 4” story is one example of this. So is a story that a 60 Minutes reporting team including correspondent Bill Whitaker has been working on in London over the past few days. The working title of the piece is “Londongrad,” and it’s about the history of Russian oligarchs decamping to the city. Sometimes, as Owens pointed out to me, after being courted by the British government — via so-called “golden visa” sweetheart deals.

The UK Parliament’s House of Lords has begun to increasingly scrutinize these oligarchs’ business interests because — and this is one of the many curious facts the story will no doubt include — there’s actually a larger collection of these oligarchs in London than there are left in Russia.

That, Owens adds, is an example of a 60 Minutes piece that’s connected to the war in Ukraine. But it’s not about the war in Ukraine.

“60 Minutes must exist today, because the quality of information has become so poor,” Pelley told me. “People are getting information in tiny fragments. People are getting disinformation fed to them, from all corners. And 60 Minutes is a place where you can go still today, thank God, where you can see a story that is well-researched, well-edited, supervised by the best executive producer in television, and well-written.

“So I think 60 Minutes’ reason to be has never been greater. 60 Minutes is more relevant, more important today than it ever has been in its history.”