Veteran '60 Minutes' correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, Jon Wertheim will stay on show

The last three "60 Minutes" correspondents left standing have decided to remain in place: Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim announced Friday in a joint memo "to all our colleagues at '60'" that they will stay with the show "for now."

In the memo, which was released to the media, they said "we feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure [but] that simply is not the case" — a reference to the appointment of a new executive producer, Nick Bilton, who fired senior correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday after a bruising takedown in which Pelley charged that Bilton's boss, Bari Weiss, was "murdering" the broadcast.

The memo continued, "we don't want to see '60 Minutes die.' We have been grieving because this whole mess has wounded and damaged the broadcast. We want to stay and fight, try to repair and preserve our reputation by continuing the Mike Wallace tradition of 'hold their feet to the fire ...'"

And so — also for now — the deepest crisis in "60 Minutes'" 58-year history has been abated — a crisis that called into question how the program could get on the air this September without any of the original correspondents in place. Besides Pelley, veteran reporters Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were also let go last week, along with the entire senior production staff, which included the show's executive producer, Tanya Simon, and executive editor, Draggan Mihailovich. That left just Stahl, Whitaker and Wertheim — a relative newcomer, who joined in 2017, but who has a big career beyond "60" as a prolific author and sports columnist.

Would they stay or would they go? And if they went, then what?

Moreover, both Weiss and Bilton have taken a beating in the court of public opinion, which these days most often means X and Substack, both flooded with predictions about the demise, then extinction, of "60" in recent days. Clearly, an embattled Weiss needed those posts to go away, and for now anyway, they just might have.

Losing Stahl — a symbol of this broadcast as much as correspondent — would have been a devastating blow. When she joined in 1991, only two other female correspondents had preceded her, Meredith Vieira and Diane Sawyer, while in the ensuing years she built a stature exceeded only by Mike Wallace.

But just as "60" needed Stahl, she too needed "60." She's 84, but few observers expected her to walk away from a broadcast so closely tied to her identity. In a move construed as "covering her bets," the newsletter Puck reported Friday that Stahl had retained a powerful Hollywood agent, Bryan Lourd. Before the end of the most recent season, which wrapped in May, both Stahl and Whitaker, were believed to have agreed to short-term contracts.

The memo, "from Lesley, Bill and Jon," began with "we have had a hard time deciding whether to stay [because] we're still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who everyone respected. As far as we can tell — because no explanation has ever been offered, they were expelled because they fought for our '60 Minutes' values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity ... This goes for Sharyn, Cecilia and Scott as well, all at the top of the world of TV journalism who exemplified 60 Minutes' ethos of tough questions and honest storytelling ... We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency."