Fire Bari Weiss

Memo to the Ellisons: no news organization survives when credible journalists accuse the boss of tampering with the content of multiple news stories.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss must be fired. Today.

News requires credibility. News requires balance. News requires judgment. Leading a major news organization requires all of this, managerial talent, and organizational leadership. Eight months into her tenure, she has shredded the organization’s credibility, put her thumb on the scale to mock the very idea of balance, undermined those with better judgment, destroyed morale among the workforce, and her leadership skills are the kind where no one would follow her out of a burning building.

In recent weeks, three prominent and extremely credible journalists accused Weiss of tampering with the content of multiple news stories at 60 Minutes, the nation’s most watched news program. The most recent example comes from recently fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley who told the New York Times that Weiss pressured him to lie about the Renee Good killing in Minneapolis. (He did not.) Editorial interference like this is completely unacceptable and should not be tolerated, not by the CBS & the 60 Minutes staff, not by the corporate owners David and Larry Ellison, not by anyone.

Weiss via CBS public relations claims this was normal back and forth but it’s not. There are many layers of editors at 60 Minutes whose actual job it is to review and suggest updates to stories but none of them would surely ever consider asking Scott Pelley to fabricate details like Pelley alleges Weiss did here.

Together, Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega have over 100 years of hard hitting news reporting experience. They know how to ask tough questions, dig deep for hidden secrets, speak truth to power and tell honest, fair and objective news stories. Each of them has now publicly accused Bari Weiss or members of her management team of repeatedly overstepping acceptable news oversight to tamper with or even censor their news stories. It is hard to overstate how wildly inappropriate and dangerous that is.

Pelley’s latest accusations are truly mortifying. In an incredible interview with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Pelley detailed Weiss’ efforts to insert a pro-Trump narrative into his piece on the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pelley had hinted at the editorial interference when he was fired from 60 Minutes last week saying in a statement that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”

Now in the NYT interview, Pelley goes into incredible, damning detail saying “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.“

He adds:

“We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

The entire Pelley interview is jaw dropping but it’s Weiss’ attempt to change the facts of his story that really got me. It is hard to overstate how completely inappropriate and unprecedented that sort of corporate meddling is. Nor is it the first time Weiss has meddled with CBS news content trying to put a pro-Trump spin on it.

Last December, Weiss infamously shelved Sharyn Alfonsi’s piece on the CECOT torture prison claiming it needed an on camera response from the Trump administration even though the adm has repeatedly refused to participate. As has been well documented, Alfonsi went public at the time with allegations that Weiss spiked the story for political reasons, not legitimate editorial concerns. She wrote:

“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

Weiss fired Alfonsi in the 60 Minutes bloodbath last week. Alfonsi has been a news reporter since Bari Weiss was in grade school. She’s worked in local TV news and at both ABC NEWS and CBS News including the last 10 years at 60 Minutes. Alfonsi knows how to report a credible news story unlike Weiss who is an opinion writer, not a news reporter. If, like Pelley, Alfonsi is raising an alarm about the corporate meddling at CBS, we should listen.

The same goes for the testimony coming from Cecilia Vega, the 3rd 60 Minutes correspondent who got the axe. Vega also shared examples of Weiss’ efforts to compromise 60 Minutes reporting. Vega wrote:

“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”

These journalists have credibility. They got it the old fashioned way- they earned it. And what they are telling us is that CBS, under Weiss’ leadership, is no longer a credible news organization. It is, instead, a place where the things that make news news- fairness, accuracy, balance, judgement, reporting, fact checking, are less important than political spin.

That should have been more than enough reason for the remaining correspondents at 60 Minutes- Leslie Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim- to quit but so far, it’s not. It is beyond me that any of them can continue to work for a company and a news boss like Bari Weiss who so clearly violates every single journalism principle and so easily treats its employees like trash. The trio claims it’s staying because they don’t want 60 Minutes to die. I have news for Leslie, Bill and Jon: 60 Minutes is already dead, Bari Weiss killed it.

All of us who believe in the First Amendment and the importance of fact based journalism, should call out Weiss’s untoward behavior and put pressure on the Ellison’s to terminate her. Recall the outrage that quickly bubbled up when Disney pulled late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and his program off the air after pressure from Trump and his FCC chair? We need a similar response right now.

We as Americans must not acquiesce to the perversion and politicization of our mainstream news media. The country is already teetering from Trump’s authoritarian schemes. We cannot permit him and his acolytes to completely corrupt journalism, turning a credible news outlet into state media.

So call CBS News and Paramount/ Skydance to register your outrage and demand that Weiss be fired immediately. Turn off CBS. Many viewers have already done just that with the CBS Evening News and it is now suffering a historic ratings collapse. Let companies advertising on CBS know of your displeasure with news tampering and cancel your Paramount subscriptions. It’s the least we can do.

Jennifer Schulze is a former local TV news exec, reporter & producer based in Chicago with a few opinions about the news. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.

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