(DCNF)—Amid promises of change, CBS News replaced its embattled “60 Minutes” executive producer — who oversaw the edited Kamala Harris interview — with another registered Democrat.
CBS News announced Thursday that “60 Minutes” interim executive producer Tanya Simon would become the official executive producer, replacing Bill Owens. Simon, who is the daughter of the late CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, has been a veteran of the show for 25 years and is now its fourth executive producer in the show’s decades-long history.
“Tanya Simon understands what makes 60 MINUTES tick. She is an innovative leader, an exceptional producer and someone who knows how to inspire people,” president and executive editor of CBS News Tom Cibrowski said in a press release. “Tanya knows that the success of today’s 60 MINUTES depends on delivering a weekly mix of the most informative, impactful and entertaining stories and investigative journalism from around the world. This is the true essence and foundation of 60 MINUTES.”
However, with CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, officially securing its acquisition Thursday and vowing change at the network, Simon appears to be the same kind of leader as those in the past. Registered as a Democrat, Simon’s husband Evan Garfein has also donated a total of $2,320 to Democratic candidates and committees between 2019 to 2024, according to the Federal Election Commission.
According to public donation records, Garfein’s latest contribution was made in November 2024 to the major Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue for $100, with his largest donation made in 2019 to former Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper.
The announcement for Simon comes just months after Owens announced his departure from the show in April, saying that “60 Minutes” had lost journalistic independence. His exit came as Paramount was in acquisition talks with American media production and finance company Skydance, and amid a lawsuit from President Donald Trump.
In October 2024, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS after the network quietly edited an interview with Harris — allegedly to favor the then-vice president — as the campaigns were just a month out from Election Day.
At the time of the interview’s release, a clip of Harris’ exchange with “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker was posted on a Sunday and made her response appear more concise compared to the full segment released a day later. Notably, also at the time of the interview’s release, Simon had been the show’s executive editor since April 2019, according to her LinkedIn profile.
After Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Bredan Carr opened an investigation into the issue, CBS News released the full, unedited version of Harris’ interview in February. Additionally, vocal callouts of Owens began to circulate after the New York Post’s editorial board said that CBS News could fix its “lefty-propaganda problem” by cutting Owens loose.
Owens reportedly refused to apologize for the editing decisions made, allegedly telling staff that the company knew he wouldn’t be saying sorry for anything the show had done, according to The New York Times. Upon Owen’s departure, the former executive producer sent a memo to his staff, saying that it was “clear” he would “not be allowed to run the show” as he “always” had.
“To make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience. So, having defended this show- and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” Owens wrote.
“Look, I have worked at CBS News for 37 years, more than half of that at 60 Minutes, I have been shot at and threatened with jail for protecting a source. I have overseen more than 600 stories as Executive Producer of 60,” Owens added. “I know who I am and what I have don[e] to cover the most important stories of our time under difficult conditions.”
On Tuesday, Trump announced on Truth Social that CBS and its parent company had agreed to pay an additional $20 million on top of the $16 million they had already agreed to contribute toward his presidential library, bringing the total settlement to $36 million.
CBS said it made cuts to shows like late-night host Stephen Colbert’s due to financial concerns. Skydance secured its acquisition of Paramount Global, which includes subsidiaries such as the CBS broadcast network, Paramount Pictures, and Nickelodeon. The official deal was made after Skydance pledged on Tuesday to do away with Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
In a letter sent to Carr, the company vowed to dismantle all DEI initiatives in place, which comes after a slew of private companies have followed Trump’s executive order eliminating DEI policies at the federal level.
Upon the announcement of the acquisition, Carr posted a statement to X, calling out how Americans “no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly.”
“It is time for a change. That is why I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” Carr wrote. “In particular, Skydance has made written commitments to ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.”
In addition to seeking to eliminate DEI policies, Skydance also committed to “addressing bias & restoring fact-based reporting” and “investing in trusted local news.”
“These changes would represent an important step towards earning back Americans’ trust. Will be watching,” Carr wrote on X.
CBS News and Simon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
