Steve Kroft worked as a correspondent on 60 Minutes with CBS for 30 years from 1989 until he retired in 2019, and he apparently “hated it.”
Kroft revealed his thoughts on working for the famed television show in an interview on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live!, and while he called the job “exhilarating,” he also apparently “hated it,” candidly admitting he “probably wouldn’t do it again.”
“I probably wouldn’t do it again,” said Kroft. “I hated it. Look, the best job I ever had at CBS was when I was correspondent at the London bureau and got to see the world. That was the job I always wanted. 60 Minutes was really appealing, and I thought I wasn’t really sure I was ever gonna get there. I didn’t really seriously think about it.”
Kroft described 60 Minutes as a “24 hours a day” job that had him traveling from place to place while writing scripts and attending screenings over and over again.
“It was exhilarating. … The reason I loved the job was because of the stories that I could do and the fact that they liked good stories,” he said. “I was kind of at a disadvantage. I was the first person on that show who had not been an anchorman, wasn’t really well known. I’d been a lot on the evening news, and I had been at West 57th, but I had to keep doing it.”
While Kroft did not say if this contributed to his distaste with 60 Minutes, he said that his getting the job earned him just as many enemies as friends.
“Not everybody was happy that I got [the job],” he said. “There were other people that wanted, so then you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies. It’s a snake pit.”
As noted by People, Kroft’s career highlights include his 1992 “conversation with then-Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, his 2008 interview with Barack and Michelle Obama, Obama’s last interview as president in January 2017, and the only television interview with Woody Allen during his custody battle with Mia Farrow.”
