CBS Sunday Morning criticizes itself for giving Woody Allen "legitimacy" showing shelved interview

The Hollywood Reporter

On Saturday, CBS announced Paramount+ will be streaming an unaired CBS Sunday Morning interview that correspondent Lee Cowan conducted with Allen last year for a special delving into the director's career and controversies timed to the release of his memoir. The interview would be packaged with Gayle King's 2018 interview with Dylan Farrow as a Paramount+ special. This morning during a segment on "Cancelled Culture: Reconsidering the art of controversial artists," CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Erin Moriarty took aim at the interview -- which, again, never aired on CBS -- by quoting art critic Aruna D'Souza. "If someone is there being interviewed, they're given a kind of legitimacy just by the fact that they're being interviewed on a big newscast," D'Souza said. As The Hollywood Reporter's Alex Weprin notes, the long-delayed interview raised eyebrows since it was Allen's first one-on-one TV interview with a U.S. broadcaster in nearly 30 years (his last interview was with CBS' 60 Minutes in 1992) and came after his memoir was canceled by Hachette. "Normally, an exclusive interview of that nature would be a significant booking, given the renewed accusations of abuse by Dylan Farrow. However, CBS ended up letting the interview sit on the shelf, until now," says Weprin. In a statement, CBS News says that the interview was shelved due to the "active news cycle" last year, with COVID-19 raging, the presidential election and social justice protests across the country. The decision to air it on Paramount+ was due to "renewed interest in the controversy surrounding the filmmaker," given the recent HBO docuseries Allen v. Farrow. "To be honest, due to the swirling controversy, the storm of opinion, both pro and con, we gave careful consideration whether to do this interview at all," Cowan said at the top of the interview on Paramount+. "But you’re about to see it...Whether or not you believe Woody Allen, whether or not you even like him, we hope you’ll at least want to hear what he has to say."