Remaining '60 Minutes' stars refuse to quit in defiant note to CBS colleagues

Three remaining “60 Minutes” veterans have decided on their futures with the beleaguered broadcast mainstay.

Longtime correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim announced Friday they would stay on at the news magazine despite turmoil engulfing the CBS News division under the leadership of editor in chief Bari Weiss.

“We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay,” the trio wrote in a memo to their colleagues. “We don’t want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die.”

The three said they were “heartbroken” over the recent firings of their colleagues, including executive producer Tanya Simon and high-ranking producer Draggan Mihailovich, and they seemed to share concerns with correspondent Scott Pelley, who was also fired this week after challenging the new executive producer, Nick Bilton over the program's direction.

“We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure," the three wrote. "That is simply, categorically not the case."

“Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships,” they added in their memo.