Ross Douthat Leaves New York Times Opinion Page for CBS's 60 Minutes

Ross Douthat is leaving his New York Times column to join 60 Minutes as a correspondent. That much is settled. What happens to his old job is not.

Douthat spent nearly two decades as the Times' most visible in-house conservative, known for what Times opinion editor Katie Kingsbury described in a staff memo, according to reporting cited by The Guardian, as "a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism." Kingsbury added that Douthat "was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring."

The hire itself has confused a lot of media watchers. Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, called the reaction in media circles "disbelief," noting Douthat has no broadcast television experience and built his career as an opinion writer, not an investigative reporter. Sullivan points out he's replacing people like Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, correspondents with decades of shoe-leather reporting behind them, plus Anderson Cooper, who left amid internal complaints about political bias creeping into 60 Minutes segments.

But Sullivan also lays out why the hire actually tracks with where CBS News is headed. New owner David Ellison, the billionaire son of Larry Ellison, installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in October. Weiss also had zero TV news experience and made her name on the opinion side, founding The Free Press after leaving her own opinion editor job at the Times amid public complaints about the paper's internal culture. Weiss then picked Nick Bilton, another TV outsider, to run 60 Minutes. Douthat fits the pattern CBS has already established: opinion writers who lean right, moving into roles historically reserved for career newsroom reporters.

Sullivan also notes Ellison has been working to get corporate mergers approved by the Trump administration, which she frames as part of the motivation for CBS's rightward-looking personnel moves. CBS parent Paramount needed federal sign-off on deals, and cozying up to an administration that controls that approval process is a rational business calculation, whatever else it says about editorial independence.

Now the Times has to fill the chair. The Daily Signal's Tim Graham argues that's going to be a real problem, because the paper's current opinion roster is thin on the right. Graham lists the remaining columnists as Jamelle Bouie, Maureen Dowd, David French, Thomas Friedman, M. Gessen, Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Nicholas Kristof, Carlos Lozada, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lydia Polgreen and Bret Stephens, a group he characterizes as running from left to center-left.

Graham's sharper point is about French and Stephens specifically. Both came to the Times from conservative backgrounds, and both endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. Graham calls that shift disqualifying for anyone who wants to keep calling himself a conservative columnist. French wrote publicly that he was voting for Harris to "save conservatism from itself," and Stephens also backed her. Whether that vote makes someone no longer conservative is a matter of definition, not fact, but it's true that neither man currently writes columns defending Trump-era Republican positions with any regularity.

Graham also revives the 2020 case of James Bennet, the Times opinion editor forced out after the paper published a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed arguing the Insurrection Act could be invoked against rioters. The Times attached a lengthy editor's note apologizing for the piece and never ran it in print. It's fair to cite this episode as evidence the paper's internal culture has been hostile to hard-right arguments making it onto the page unfiltered.

Jonah Goldberg's piece in The Dispatch takes a lighter approach, floating names for who might replace Douthat without settling on an answer, treating the vacancy as an open and slightly absurd guessing game rather than a crisis.

The strongest pushback to Graham's argument is this: the Times isn't required to hire someone who defends Trump to prove it has ideological diversity. A paper can reasonably decide its conservative columnist should be a critic of a sitting president without abandoning conservatism itself, the same way center-left outlets employ writers critical of Democratic leadership. Douthat himself was frequently critical of Trump while still writing recognizably conservative columns on religion, culture and institutions.

Still, the practical question stands: will the Times replace Douthat with someone willing to defend Republican positions on immigration, judicial nominations, or the Trump administration's specific policy moves, or will it pick another conservative-in-name-only who ends up, like French and Stephens, becoming a reliable anti-Trump vote come election season. No replacement has been named as of this writing. Whoever gets the job will be writing under an opinion section that, by its own editors' account, values being "intellectually restless," but has a documented history, via the Bennet episode, of enforcing limits on how restless that gets when it comes to the right.