Which is worse, her political malevolence or her incompetence?
After CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was fired by Bari Weiss’s incompetent henchman Nick Bilton last week, the network veteran went public with his complaints about Weiss’s politically motivated mismanagement of the show. One of his most noteworthy complaints was that she pushed the correspondents to add distortions and lies to some of their segments. Media critics asked that Pelley be more specific, and on Sunday, with The New York Times, he was.
Most outrageously, he told Lulu Garcia-Navarro that for a February segment on the ICE siege of Minneapolis, four hours after the show’s final deadline, Weiss asked him to make the protesters look more violent, and add that the martyr Renée Good, mother and poet, was driving toward her murderer (even though multiple forensic video examinations, including by CBS, concluded that she had already turned the car away from him when he shot her in the head). Pelley refused, and the segment ran as it had been produced. He never heard back from Weiss about it.
“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 added.
I’m as big a fan of Pelley’s bravery in confronting Weiss and Bilton as any journalist with integrity, but I have to point out, with respect, that Pelley had already bent over backward to present “both sides” of ICE’s deadly siege of the city. In the interview with Garcia-Navarro, he exaggerated the violence of the protesters, saying they accounted for “half” of the “confrontations” that rocked Operation Metro Surge:
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…. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes.
OK, a snowball, a chest-bump, and a kicked out police-car taillight. And some screaming. Compared with two murders, at least one other shooting, an innocent disabled woman violently pulled from her car, an elderly Hmong man wrested from his house in his underwear in the brutal Minneapolis cold, protesters tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos kidnapped from school and taken to Texas as immigration authorities tried to deport his father… I just did that from memory. Oh, and a whole lot of screaming and swearing by ICE and CBP officers. “Fuckin’ bitch,” which is what Jonathan Ross said after murdering Renée Good, is just one example.
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But I don’t want to be too hard on Pelley. He is a distinguished 37-year-veteran of a news organization steeped in notions of “objectivity” and “balance” that haven’t really served the country since the Reagan years. This is his default. And especially in the Trump years, I think even some good journalists who want to resist falling victim to Trump’s attacks, whether that’s extorting $16 million out of ABC with a lawsuit the network would have won and the same amount from CBS for an even more bogus lawsuit, are looking over their shoulders more.
Given all the surrendering we’ve seen from top media executives and some journalists, Pelley’s courage stands out. Just a week ago, he confronted Bilton to his face demanding an explanation for Weiss’s decision to fire esteemed 60 Minutes producer Tania Simon and veteran correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega a few days before. He called it “Black Thursday” and said Weiss was “murdering” the venerable television news magazine.
“She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job,” Pelley told Bilton, and he asked why the former tech journalist had taken the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Bilton shot back, “I am not intimidated,” but he left the meeting after only 15 minutes, telling staff, “Enjoy the bagels.”
Weiss charged Pelley with creating a “hostile work environment,” and Bilton fired him a day later, “for cause,” which means he got no severance. (That’s gonna be a fun lawsuit for Pelley’s attorneys.)
Pelley told Garcia-Navarro why he confronted Bilton publicly:
There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don’t know that, have never felt that, and don’t understand it, is a tragedy.
A week before the blowup with Bilton, Pelley showed courage by standing alongside a student journalist, Santiago Campos, who won a $10,000 scholarship in the name of venerated 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Campos thanked CBS, but said he had to “acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.” Pelley put his arm around the young man after his speech. “We look forward to seeing your work in the future,” he said. “God, we need young people like you right behind us. I know that Mike Wallace is looking down at you with pride at this very moment.”
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Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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