• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

It must really be something to come to the decision to quit your job over a principle.

What if the job represented the culmination of years of hard work, ambition and dedication? What if it was a top job in your industry that you had set up as a goal to shoot for and then got it?

Then, you decide to give it up. Somewhere higher up in the chain of command, individuals with no background in the processes and ethics associated with your profession were intervening.

And they were pressuring you to reverse everything you have learned and believed in about what it takes to meet your responsibilities to create great work on a very high level.

For Wendy McMahon, president of CBS News, and Bill Owens, executive producer of “60 Minutes,” resigning rather than be parties to a pending settlement with Trump must have been tough to do.

Trump filed a lawsuit last year that eventually asked $20 billion in damages from CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global. 

The suit centers on a tiny edit “60 Minutes” made in an interview with Kamala Harris last October that Trump thinks was tantamount to election fraud.

His lawsuit amounts to a meritless temper tantrum thrown by a baby with power and money.

Experts agree that the suit would not survive a serious challenge in court, but Paramount seems poised to settle it anyway so the Trump administration won’t block Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance Media.

The problem is that one of the reported conditions of the settlement is for CBS News to apologize for the edit. 

For McMahon, who resigned this week, and Owens, who quit last month, this demand was reportedly the last straw. They quit rather than apologize for something nobody did.

McMahon, 51, held top positions in local TV stations and station groups (ABC and CBS) for years, eventually rising to co-president in 2021 -- with Neeraj Khemalani -- of a new division at CBS combining management of CBS News with the CBS-owned TV stations.

In 2023, Khemlani left the company and McMahon became sole president of CBS News and Stations, plus president of CBS Media Ventures, the company’s syndication division that distributes “Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy!,” “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Drew Barrymore Show.”

It is a very high position, and no doubt positioned her to go even further up the ladder had she stayed -- not to mention the money she must have been making. But she said good-bye to all that on moral and ethical grounds.

Owens did the same thing. He worked for CBS News for 37 years -- about half that time for “60 Minutes” as a producer of stories for which he traveled the world with the “60 Minutes” stars. 

He became executive producer of “60 Minutes” in 2019. It is a job that stands at the very pinnacle of the journalism profession. As such, one assumes it would be hard to give up.

But that is what Owens did, rather than be forced to issue an apology that would imply that “60 Minutes” did anything wrong, much less commit election fraud.

Who among us would quit a job over a principle? I’m not sure I would, but then again, I have never been president of CBS News or executive producer of “60 Minutes.”