Anderson Cooper bid farewell to CBS News‘ 60 Minutes on Sunday night after 20 years on the newsmagazine by praising the show’s “independence” and “trust it has with viewers.”
“I hope 60 Minutes stays 60 Minutes,” he said in an interview on 60 Minutes Time beyond regulation. “There’s only a few things which have been around for so long as 60 Minutes has and maintain the standard that it has, and things can all the time evolve and alter, and I believe that’s awesome, and things should evolve and alter, but I hope the core of what 60 Minutes is all the time stays.”
60 Minutes has been making headlines recently under its latest ownership of David Ellison and Ellison’s hiring of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss. In December, Weiss pulled a segment on the “brutal and torturous conditions” on the El Salvador prison where the Trump Administration sent deportees. An official statement said the story “needed additional reporting.”
60 Minutes has also faced criticism for reportedly sidelining legendary correspondent Lesley Stahl and drafting in Major Garrett to interview Benjamin Netanyahu, after negotiations between Weiss and the Israeli prime minister.
And President Trump won a victory after suing the corporate over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit resulted in parent company Paramount Global settling in a $16 million payout. A part of the settlement agreement included stipulations for Paramount to release 60 Minutes transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates post-air.
“I believe the independence of 60 Minutes has been critical,” Cooper continued on Time beyond regulation. “I believe also the variability of stories. If you see a 60 Minutes story and also you’re like, ‘That was a very good story,’ it was story since it requires time, it requires patience, it requires money. … I hope 60 Minutes is around for when my kids grow up and have kids of their very own they usually can watch it with their kids.”
Cooper said a pair of things led to his decision to depart the show.
“The entire time I’ve done pieces at 60 Minutes, my full-time job has been over at CNN and still is, and it’s been really difficult to do the type of work you want to do to,” he said, sharing that he’s worked on his 60 Minutes stories mostly while using his vacation time from CNN. “I’ve loved it, nevertheless it’s been tough.”
The second reason? His kids.
“I’ve got a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, and I need to spend as much time with them as I can while they still wish to spend time with me, and on those days, that clock is ticking,” he said. “I don’t think the truth has really hit me that I’m not gonna be doing this any longer, you already know, to offer up something you’ve watched because you were a child, yeah, I’ll miss this.”
Cooper also delved more into his passion for 60 Minutes as a baby.
“I used to be a weird little kid,” he said. “I liked watching news. After my dad died there was numerous silence in my house and we might watch the news over dinner, you already know something just like the old-time CBS correspondents.”
He then praised legendary 60 Minutes correspondents including Morley Safer, Mike Wallace and Bob Simon, marveling he got the latter’s office when Simon died.
“60 Minutes has all the time been a spot, a minimum of for me, that you simply get to step into any person else’s shoes,” Cooper said. “You get to see things through their eyes and see what their struggles are and what they’re facing, and also you learn from that. … You never knew what you were going to get, but you were willing to go for the ride since you trusted the people on it that it was going to be story.”
He said doing a story for 60 Minutes feels “such as you’re entering into people’s lives and also you’re invited into people’s homes. You’re invited into their struggles. You’re invited into whatever it’s that has brought them to be on 60 Minutes. … Sometimes it’s something wonderful they’ve done, sometimes something terrible that’s happened to them. … It looks like making a human reference to any person, with the ability to ask any person, you already know, deeply personal questions and having conversations with people. It’s a privilege.”
The Time beyond regulation segment featured clips of Cooper’s interviews with Donald Sutherland, Dave Grohl, Adele, Timothée Chalamet, Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss and more, together with clips where Cooper got to participate in some high-adventure activities, from scuba diving to search out Nile crocodiles to jet skiing the large waves of Nazaré, Portugal, with legendary surfer Garrett McNamara — which resulted in him burning his corneas from the UV reflection off the water.
Cooper also mentioned how high the bar is at 60 Minutes to get a story on air, noting that everybody who works on the show is the “best” of their field.
At the top of the segment, Cooper got emotional when saying the correspondents’ signature intro — “I’m Anderson Cooper” — for the last time. Watch it below.