The Great Omission

Bill Owens' Departure from 60 Minutes Raises Questions About Journalism's Priorities and Our National Understanding of How Things Work

Editor’s Note: Just FYI. We turned green for a minute there. But we’ve rolled over a bit today. Stay cautious in this market environment.

Dear Fellow Traveler:

I love Sunday… If only for the news.

I watch Meet the Press. And I devour Barron’s.

Then, in the evening, I am turning on 60 Minutes.

Yeah, I know, it’s been a rough few years.

But I’m a sucker for what the news used to be…

I told a friend of mine a decade ago about how I was born in the wrong era.

“I’m 30 years old, and 40 years past my prime,” I told him.

I was referring to the eras of journalism. I pined to live in a world of Walter Cronkite and Jim McKay. I would have loved to be someone like Jon Miller or Vin Scully… one man in a booth calling baseball games.

I would use a typewriter over a laptop any day.

I love the productivity gains of the last twenty years… and the massive number of ideas flowing worldwide…

There’s just something about the process of writing that requires greater selectivity in what you want to say… and how you say it… on a typewriter…

I admired the simple flow of the evening news show—light production, simple narratives. I’ve long loved 60 Minutes—not because of the news quality, but because of the production quality. It takes the world seriously.

The Jeffrey Wigand Tobacco Whistleblower Interview of 1996… the Jack Kevorkian Interview of 1998… the Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Investigation… Lara Logan’s Benghazi Attack Investigation… the Osprey Investigation… the Frances Haugen interview on Facebook… and Lenell Geter's Wrongful Conviction investigation (a report that influenced me greatly)

Yes, 60 Minutes has made errors. But when they’re on… they’re on.

So, I was surprised to learn that executive producer Bill Owens is resigning.

He’s worried about his journalistic independence.

Say what you will… but departure marks a significant moment for what has long been considered television's premier investigative journalism program.

I have always loved the cinematography, editing, and narrative structure.

It’s unmatched in broadcast journalism.

BUT…

There’s always a But…

I've been increasingly concerned about a critical blind spot in their coverage.

Like so many other programs, 60 Minutes has struggled to explain the role of monetary policy in society.

You know… the Money Printer.

While 60 Minutes has long focused heavily on presidents and Congress, it consistently misses that the Federal Reserve has more impact on Americans than almost any other institution.

And so - if they want to hire a Medill grad to take over production, consider this my interview.

If they improved their financial journalism, especially at the investigative level, most Americans would have more faith in the media.

Let me explain…

Deference, Not Journalism

60 Minutes has dropped the ball on the role of the Fed.

We’ve had three Fed chairs since the 2008 crisis.

And in those rare interviews with central bankers, it’s clear that the interviewers have little understanding of what the Fed does.

Go back to March 2009.

Just months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 60 Minutes scored a rare interview with then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.

The headline takeaway? "We've averted a depression."

The focus was on emergency lending and restoring confidence in the system.

What wasn't asked?

• How those bailouts disproportionately helped the asset-owning elite.

• How quantitative easing (QE)—the purchase of government and mortgage bonds—would inflate stocks, bonds, and housing prices, while wages remained stagnant.

• How flooding financial institutions with liquidity would deepen America's wealth divide.

These are the things Americans needed to know, because they ultimately led to elections like 2016 and 2024.

Again, with Bernanke, there were no questions about the implications of suppressing interest rates for a generation.

No discussion of how monetary policy bypasses the working class and flows directly into capital markets.

And certainly no mention of who gains and who pays the price.

That deference has been a trend for the post-2008 world.

The Post-COVID Replay

Let’s speed forward to May 2020.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell appeared on 60 Minutes amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Federal Reserve had slashed interest rates to zero and bought hundreds of billions in assets to stabilize markets.

Powell said he was "doing whatever it takes," and creating the conditions for recovery.

But again, the segment ignored how these actions disproportionately benefited hedge funds, tech companies, and real estate investors.

It didn't explore how this torrent of liquidity led to one of the greatest speculative booms in history. At the same time, tens of millions of Americans fell behind on rent and relied on stimulus checks for survival.

Even today, during Fed meetings, we don’t get the obvious questions…

How does the Fed reconcile a soaring stock market with deepening poverty and unemployment?

What mechanisms are in place to ensure that low rates and QE benefit Main Street, not just Wall Street?

Those questions never came.

They still don’t.

And yet, here’s a Medill School of Journalism grad with three advanced degrees in economics and finance who is ACTIVELY enthusiastic about asking these questions to powerful institutions.

You know… journalism.

Inflation, Inequality, and the Missed Story

This isn’t just about the Fed.

There was also a 2022 interview with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on 60 Minutes. Inflation was at levels we hadn’t seen in more than 40 years.

Yellen was optimistic.

She said that inflation was coming down, and the labor market was strong.

But no one asked: how much of this inflation is the downstream effect of years of monetary excess?

Or, why is it that asset owners are doing fine, while renters, savers, and wage workers are suffering?

The American public never understood how years of ultra-loose monetary policy distorted markets, created artificial asset prices, and punished those without assets.

Nor did they hear that this wasn't just a "bug" in the system—it was a feature—a design choice—one that 60 Minutes continually failed to challenge.

In each of these interviews, the questions should have gone deeper.

Questions like:

• How does the Fed's QE policy drive up the price of stocks and real estate while doing nothing to raise wages?

• Why do asset bubbles always benefit the top 1%, while inflation punishes the bottom 99%?

• What safeguards are in place to prevent monetary policy from becoming a wealth extraction tool?

• Has the Fed's dual mandate—maximum employment and stable prices—been replaced by a third, unspoken goal: supporting asset prices? Or worse - the Fed acting as the global central bank - and the buyer and lender of last resort…

A Structural Failure

Again… the failure here is not just journalistic—it's structural.

When media treat central banks as benevolent, non-political institutions rather than powerful actors with clear winners and losers, they rob the public of the context needed to make sense of what’s happening today.

In the next few days, you’ll see a report from me on how the Fed and other institutions have damned the dollar.

The policies built around protecting our dollar as a global asset fueled the destruction of our manufacturing sector.

These aren’t hard things to put together, and if you go into this interview prepared with a deep knowledge of monetary policy, you can challenge these outright distortions of reality…

(Again… twice on Sunday.)

The Fed is not neutral. Its policies create inflation in assets, then in goods.

They enrich the top before the bottom sees a dime.

We need serious journalism around institutions like the Fed.

The public should know how monetary policy works, why it picks winners and losers, and the long-term consequences of financialization.

Until we see a shift in focus, the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will only grow wider, and the media will have played a major role in keeping it that way.

Stay positive,

Garrett Baldwin

Secretary of Reporting…