Bari Weiss Asked 60 Minutes To Lie. Scott Pelley Had Already Done Plenty On His Own.

from the bend-further-over dept

Scott Pelley just gave an interview to the NY Times that reveals two damning things at once: Bari Weiss tried to get him to falsely describe a shooting victim as driving toward the officer who killed her — and Pelley had already bent over backwards to make protesters look as bad as possible before she even asked. That second part is the part most people are glossing over.

To understand why none of this is surprising, you need to understand what Weiss has actually been doing at CBS. Indeed, we’ve covered a bit of the Bari Weissification of CBS News over the past few months. Remember, Weiss had no real reporting experience (she was a columnist, not a reporter) and zero broadcast experience. She was picked because, as my colleague Karl keeps reminding people, she’s mastered the ability to comfort the powerful by telling them exactly what they want to hear.

Radley Balko had a wonderful piece this weekend detailing how Weiss’s publication, The Free Press (which CBS massively overpaid for in order to get Weiss to come over and drive CBS News into the ground), seems to specialize in laundering bullshit, bigoted Trump talking points to sound like they’re mainstream “centrist” wisdom.

Of course, Weiss understands perfectly well the moment we’re in. She knows she wasn’t put in charge of CBS News because of her skeptical nature or keen journalistic eye. She was put in charge because she has shown that she can leverage a carefully crafted image as an iconoclast and teller of truths to launder MAGA propaganda so that it’s more palatable to centrists. She was put in charge because the Ellisons need Trump’s blessing for their mega merger – and if ever there was a favor tailor-made to win Trump’s approval, it’s kneecapping a major news network and toppling one of the last remaining pillars of broadcast journalism in the process.

Balko’s piece details how Weiss has done this with immigration:

When it launched in January 2021, the publication leaned heavily into the “Biden’s open borders crisis” narrative. And while it still publishes occasional pro-immigration pieces, that perspective has been overwhelmed by its water-carrying for the right on more immigration-adjacent issues like crime, Gaza, multiculturalism, protest and campus activism, anti-elitism (a fairly hilarious position given the social status of Weiss and her cadre of billionaire funders), and disdain for NGOs, academia, and institutions like USAID.

Rowley, who started writing for The Free Press at the end of 2023, was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that employs rabid anti-immigrant voices like Heather Mac Donald and Christopher “They’re Eating Your Pets” Rufo. A recent sampling of her social media feed makes pretty clear where her politics lie: She has pined for the days of prison slave labor, praised Donald Trump, amplified Rufo, pushed general anti-immigrant propaganda, and simped for authoritarian Trump policies like pursuing “fraud” claims against defense attorneys who represent people seeking asylum.

He goes through, in detail, how that one reporter, Madeline Rowley, completely misrepresented issues related to refugee resettlement in a manner that not only pleased the Trump administration, but set up a sort of mutual back-scratching between the Free Press and the Trump administration.

There’s a lot more in Balko’s piece, and it’s well worth reading (and should give you pause before ever trusting anything that a Weiss-controlled news organization puts out).

All of that is useful background as you read the interview that just fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley gave to the NY Times this weekend. There’s a lot in there, but here’s the bit that I wanted to discuss:

You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.

So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. 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.

There’s a lot in there, and many people are (understandably) focused on the ridiculous demands that Weiss made to inject clear bias and falsehoods into the report. But what should stand out even more is that Pelley here freely admits that he and the team at 60 Minutes had already inserted massive bias into the report, deliberately searching out footage that showed protesters in the worst possible light — “I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively” — even if that was an outlier from the rest of the protests. He even made sure to include the fact that Pretti had, on a previous occasion at a different protest, kicked out a taillight on a federal agent’s car — information that has zero bearing whether or not CBP officers were justified in murdering him.

But Pelley insists that he had to do this to make the piece as “fair” as possible.

He doesn’t mean “fair.” He means the poisonous “view from nowhere” form of “fairness” — the one where if one side does something bad (say, murder a random person for protesting violent government agents kidnapping their neighbors) you have to show something to suggest “well, maybe they deserved it.”

That is already ridiculous, and should be a clear condemnation of where CBS News and 60 Minutes already have their heads at. The same company that had previously paid a bribe to the president to get its merger with Paramount approved has long been chickenshit about reporting accurately on anything that might make MAGA sad.

Weiss’s hiring was never about taking a “leftist” news organization and making it more balanced or right-leaning. It was always about taking a news organization that has been appeasing authoritarians for decades and ramping up that effort — making it even better at laundering MAGA bullshit to an unsuspecting public.

And, as Balko notes in his piece, that’s one thing Weiss has shown she’s truly experienced at doing.

Filed Under: alex pretti, bari weiss, journalism, protests, renee good, reporting, scott pelley, view from nowhere

Companies: cbs, cbs news, paramount