CBS News added conservative Catholic writer Ross Douthat to the new 60 Minutes lineup, weeks after he confirmed on his podcast that he and Vice President JD Vance once watched a wine glass leap off a bar shelf on its own.
Executive producer Nick Bilton announced Douthat as one of four new correspondents and contributors joining the flagship news magazine, alongside Sebastian Junger, Gianna Toboni, and Trevor Phillips. The hires follow a sweeping shakeup that saw veteran correspondents Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega fired under the leadership of Bilton and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, The Daily Beast reported.
Douthat, a longtime opinion writer at The New York Times and former senior editor at The Atlantic, brings a background almost entirely in print journalism and commentary. He has never worked in television news production or reporting. What he does bring is a public intellectual's profile, a shelf of books on religion and American culture, and, apparently, a firsthand account of the unexplained.
The incident dates to around 2019. Vance, then 35 and in the process of converting to Catholicism, was sitting in a bar with a writer he did not name at the time. The two were discussing Pope Francis. Vance questioned the writer's criticism of the pontiff.
In an April 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine, Vance described what happened next:
"While he admitted that some Catholics went too far, he defended his more measured approach, when suddenly a wine glass seemed to leap from a stable place behind the bar and crashed on the floor in front of us."
The two men, Vance wrote, "stared at each other in silence for a bit, a little startled by what we'd just seen." The conversation ended there. Vance framed the episode as one of several "weird coincidences that hastened my decision" to enter the Catholic Church. He did not claim a single revelation drove his conversion, but the glass incident clearly left a mark.
For years, the identity of the other man at the bar remained undisclosed. That changed in June, when Vance appeared as a guest on Douthat's New York Times podcast, Interesting Times. Vance asked Douthat directly: "Did I report this accurately?" Douthat's answer was unequivocal: "You did report it accurately. There was a mysterious leap of a glass."
Readers can make of that what they will. What matters for the 60 Minutes story is the kind of thinker CBS just hired, and the kind of institution 60 Minutes is becoming under new management.
Bari Weiss arrived at CBS News as editor-in-chief with no television news background of her own, and she moved fast. She and Bilton cleared out three of the show's most recognizable faces, Pelley, Alfonsi, and Vega, in a housecleaning that signaled a sharp editorial reset. Anderson Cooper, described as the show's biggest star, left on his own after what The Daily Beast characterized as disillusionment with the new editorial direction.
Ratings have dropped during the transition, though no specific figures appear in public reporting. The new hires are plainly meant to rebuild the roster with fresh voices. Douthat is the most ideologically distinctive of the four, a writer who has argued extensively against abortion, published Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics in 2012 and Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious in 2025, and recently debated Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in a CBS News event titled "Do We Need God?"
None of that is standard résumé material for a 60 Minutes correspondent. But the old 60 Minutes was a product of an old CBS News, one that spent decades staffing its marquee show with establishment journalists whose worldview rarely extended past the Upper West Side. If Weiss and Bilton want a show that speaks to the country CBS has largely ignored, hiring a serious religious conservative is a reasonable place to start.
Vance, for his part, has had a complicated few months in the public eye. He has faced coordinated opposition from critics seeking to undermine his political standing, and his own remarks have occasionally given those critics material to work with.
The 2020 essay in The Lamp is worth revisiting because it shows a side of Vance that rarely surfaces in political coverage. He wrote with genuine deference toward the office of the Pope, a posture that sits awkwardly beside more recent events.
"My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims."
That was Vance in 2020, writing as a recent convert who saw the papacy as something above partisan scorekeeping. But the Vice President's public posture toward the current Pope, Leo XIV, has been markedly different. Vance attacked Pope Leo for speaking out against the conflict in Iran and suggested the Pope should be "careful when he talks about matters of theology." When pressed, Vance tried to deny he was "fighting" with the pontiff.
On the podcast with Douthat, Vance acknowledged the tension in his own record. "In public life you say things, and sometimes you make bone-headed comments, and sometimes you say things that are taken totally out of context," he said. That is a fair enough concession from a politician, though it does not fully square the gap between the reverent convert of 2020 and the Vice President who told the Pope to stay in his lane.
Vance has also raised concerns about sensitive conversations being leaked from inside the administration, a reminder that the pressures of high office can make even a man who once sat quietly in a bar, watching a glass move on its own, sound more like a politician than a pilgrim.
Whether Douthat can translate his print voice into television remains an open question. He has spent his career writing long, carefully argued columns and books, not standing in front of a camera delivering two-minute packages. His debate with Pinker suggests CBS has already been testing his on-air presence, but a structured debate is a long way from field reporting.
Still, the hire makes a certain kind of sense. 60 Minutes built its reputation on correspondents who brought a point of view, Mike Wallace did not pretend to be neutral, and neither did Andy Rooney. The show's decline under its previous management owed less to format than to a creeping sameness, a roster of interchangeable anchors who could have been swapped between any network newsmagazine without anyone noticing the difference.
Douthat is not interchangeable with anyone. A man who writes books arguing that everyone should be religious, who debates atheists on camera, and who confirms on the record that he witnessed an unexplained event in a bar is, at minimum, a distinctive editorial voice. Whether that voice works on Sunday-night television is Bilton's gamble.
The broader shakeup at CBS has drawn sharp reactions. Critics have framed the firings and new hires as a political project. Defenders see it as a long-overdue correction at a network that had grown stale and disconnected from large swaths of its potential audience. The foreign policy controversies swirling around the administration have only sharpened the debate over what kind of journalism CBS intends to produce.
Vance published his own book, Communion, in 2025, recounting his conversion to Catholicism. Douthat published Believe the same year. The two men clearly share an intellectual world, one in which questions about God, grace, and the supernatural are not embarrassments to be hidden but subjects to be examined seriously. That sensibility has been almost entirely absent from network news for decades.
The political left has spent months trying to define Vance through a series of controversies and unflattering comparisons. Douthat's confirmation of the bar story will give those critics fresh material. A Vice President and a new 60 Minutes hire who both believe they saw a wine glass move by itself, the jokes write themselves.
But the deeper question is whether a major news organization is finally willing to treat religious conviction as something other than a curiosity or a pathology. For decades, network news treated faith the way a nature documentary treats an exotic species, interesting to observe from a distance, never to be taken on its own terms. If Douthat's hiring signals even a partial break from that pattern, it is worth more than whatever ratings bump or backlash follows.
A news industry that cannot take seriously the beliefs of half the country was never as objective as it claimed to be.
