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
Comments on “Bari Weiss Asked 60 Minutes To Lie. Scott Pelley Had Already Done Plenty On His Own.”
I agree with Pelley and think showing the violent side of the protests was the right decision. Consider the alternative: Let’s say you decide not to show that. You show people the “average” view, scrub anything that looks like an outlier, and you show that on TV. Someone watches it, gets some info, and then they go to work the next day with their MAGA-hat wearing coworker and they discuss what was on the news last night. One guy saw scenes of peaceful crowds in colorful costumes waving signs and on the other watched Fox News and got scenes of things on fire, mob violence, chaos, etc. Both of of them can now credibly believe the other is being lied to. The 60 Minutes viewer may even begin to wonder “hey, why didn’t I see that on the news?” Viewers are going to encounter people telling them that the protests are violent. They need to be equipped with the reality of what that violence is to the extent that it truly exists to be able to put it in context.
What you’re essentially doing is telling people not to believe their lying eyes. They see something that is real (regardless of how representative it is) and you’re saying that can’t be shown because it tells the wrong story and pushes the wrong narrative. Is the purpose of news to tell people the right stories? Showing things that are real isn’t lying. Not showing something and then lying about it is fake.
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Showing them for the sake of false balance—to conflate the overwhelming majority of peaceful protests with a much smaller amount of aggressive acts/violence and act like they’re both happening in equal measure—may not be lying, but it sure as hell is bullshitting. “View from nowhere” journalism gets criticized because it aims for that false balance. If 99% of people believe the world is a spherical object thanks to centuries of scientific evidence and 1% of people believe the world is a flat rock (possibly being carried on the backs of four elephants that are being carried on the back of a giant space-faring turtle) despite no evidence proving that belief, talking about “conflicting views on the shape of the Earth” as if both sides are valid and equal and worthy of consideration is bullshit.
I don’t doubt that there were some overly aggressive protestors. But the overwhelming majority of those protestors were peaceful—angry, maybe prone to swearing, but peaceful. Pelley’s admission here is that CBS News/60 Minutes was already trying to do some “view from nowhere” bullshit even before Weiss got involved to try making the story more flattering to ICE (and Trump by extension). Even if you think showing the truth is important, you shouldn’t have to bullshit people about it.
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Everything Sauron showed Denethor in the Palantir was real, too.
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The overwhelming majority of LEOs don’t murder people either. Does that mean we shouldn’t look too closely at the ones who do because it unfairly paints the lot of them and advances the agenda of shadowy OTHERS? That argument goes both ways.
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No, it means we should look extra hard at the ones who do crimes because we’re supposed to have higher standards for cops than we do for protestors. Cops doing awful things are outliers. But they’re also protected and coddled by numerous sociopolitical systems that do things like, say, treat violent cops as “bad apple” outliers and treat violent protestors as representative of all protestors. If you can’t see why that’s an issue, you can’t see my issue with “view from nowhere” bullshit.
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Motherfucker did you just bothsides bothsidesing?
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You need to take a chill pill dude.
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Hey, that is actually true! I know because I read it in a series of books. I’m currently looking to immigrate to Ankh-Morpork because it seems less absurd or cruel than the US at the moment…
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It’s the false balance thing that has been infecting journalism since at least the late 70s. A great example is climate change. That’s been settled science since at least the Nixon administration, but for decades, to hear the news tell it, it was a 50/50 debate.
They’d go interview one real climate scientist who said it was real, and one shill scientist, often a geologist working for the oil industry, who said it wasn’t.
The public got the impression that there really was a question as to whether or not it was real even though the overwhelming majority of qualified scientists said it absolutely was.
And we lost decades of mitigation potential because of it. That’s the danger of bending over backwards to avoid offending one side or the other.
He knew the protests were almost entirely peaceful even while protestors were being gunned down in the street. If he had to show the rare moment of mild violence from the protestors, he should have made it proportional. One shot of violence from the protestors, 99 shots of peaceful protest and violence from the ICE thugs.
Journalists have decided that “balance” means tell both sides even if one is obviously wrong, but interestingly, they make some exceptions.
No one interviews someone from NAMBLA to “balance” a story on priests raping little kids, which shows us the journalists know what they’re doing and are intentionally injecting false balance into the political stories.
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yes but show the violence along with the peaceful or everyone will think it was all violent.
The truth is there was violence. One side is expected to be punished when they break the law. And the other side are ice.
Re: Re: False equivilence is not "showing both sides
Portraying “violence” only by stretching the description of “violence” beyond credible congruence the actual, on-the-ground reality, is journalistic dishonesty.
Things like snowballs and chest-bumps really, quite simply, can’t legitimately be compared to:
The “news from nowhere” false equivalence ends up being propaganda, effectively favoring the side that needs to be held to account.
It’s worth noting that press coverage from news organizations based outside the USA (Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, Scandinavia… take your pick) seem to have no trouble keeping this balance in line with reality.
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Yes, because those countries don’t have “first amendment rights” so actually have laws and regulations about what the press can do.
Especially germany.
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All of those countries have free speech rights.
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Of course you do.
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Welcome to 1973, when I was one of those dirty hippie commie (etc.) types protesting against the Vietnam War and Nixon and everything else that was wrong, and for civil rights and the environment and everything else that was right. The narrative then — by the administration and its stenographers in the media — was the same as it was now: all protesters are violent and dangerous, therefore they must he beaten and killed.
But the truth in the street was no such thing. Almost nobody was violent, ever. Protests took place constantly which were barely reported because nothing happened but some singing and chanting and some sign-waving. But if one idiot college threw a rock at some obscure protest: oh my god, it’s a violent revolution in progress, call out the National Guard. See, for example: Kent State, where students were brutally, sadistically murdered.
By the way: then, as now, almost all violent confrontations were initiated by the cops. I saw it over and over again, and at first, I was baffled — because I was naive and didn’t understand why they’d do that. But eventually I caught on: plenty of reporters would run with “drugged-up hippies attack our crew-cut shiny police officers” even though the hippies who were drugged-up were much too mellow to attack anyone. This kind of “journalism” pandered to people who were ignorant and afraid — that is, it sold well.
So half a century and change later, it’s the same old song and dance. Jackbooted-thugs who should be defending the right of the people to express their grievances are far more likely to murder them, and then go celebrate with their Klan and Nazi pals. (Could I coin Klanazi? It just kind of rolls off the tongue.) And Pelley is just another compliant cog in the machine, too weak and cowardly to be anything else.
Pelley
I’m very torn on this.
On the one hand, the good guys and bad guys in Minnesota are completely clear, and no amount of protestor misbehavior can excuse Good’s murder.
On the other hand, the protestors were trying to provoke ICE overreaction, as a matter of deliberate intent. This is exactly what King did in Selma. Protests don’t work because they exist; they work because they are effective propaganda of the deed. The press looks for conflict, and generally ignores a large number of peaceful people with signs. Effective protestors must supply conflict, or at very least a can-you-top-this headcount or (for right-wingers only) a freakshow.
Should reporters ignore this reality, and choose to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable? Maybe. But if so, they are a transmission belt for propaganda–the good guys’ propaganda in this case, but propaganda nonetheless. Or should they try to contextualize it? If so, how do you handle meta-news, especially with televised media, which doesn’t do nuance well? I’m not sure that Pelley’s decision was the correct one. But there is absolutely no way for CBS to keep its thumbs off the scale–the very process of reporting itself is news.
To recapitulate, there is no way the press can avoid becoming part of such a story, because the protests are only effective if covered sympathetically. So the problem is much worse than the “view from nowhere.”
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Blaming the victim, what a stupid take.
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Is your post too stupid to articulate exactly how my post is blaming the victim?
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“Exercising your Constitutional rights will reasonably cause your government to murder you” is … certainly a position you can take.
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If they can be so easily “provoked” into “overreaction,” they need to be far away from weapons, authority, and other human beings. “Look what you made me do” is just some abuser logic. Which tracks, given that this is a regime of, by, and for abusers.
CBS coverage is banned in my house because we’re prone to enjoying home-made bread from scratch and if I am watching CBS and smelling toast I have to assume it’s a fucking stroke.
Oh what a surprise, someone who bent the knee to ‘be fair’ to fascists was eaten by them the second they realised he still had a tiny scrap of delicious spine left. He should have asked people at the NYT how well working with Bari Weiss went for them.
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Oh yeah, because if I want someone who isn’t going to sing the praises of bothsides journalism, my first stop is gonna be the New York fuckin’ Times.
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Hey, now, that’s not fair. The NYT covers plenty of topics without a “view from nowhere” approach. Just ask trans people.
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She was without question driving right at him.
Weiss wasn’t asking Pelley to lie, she was demanding he tell the truth.
The fact that you retards can look at the very clear video and just lie about what it shows blows my mind.
She was hired to do exactly that. CBS is VERY leftwing and needs to be cleaned up. Weiss herself is a liberal, she’s just not a far-left nut like you people (and most of the media), so you lie to yourselves and pretend she’s a conservative.
The fact you think this is insane. You are literally a crazy person. This is why you are so immune to facts and logic, your fundamentally disassociated from reality.
The best policy is probably just to ignore people like you…which the country at large is increasingly doing. You are just being disregarded. And you call this “fascism”…while supporting a literal nazi in Maine. Which is why you’re being disregarded.
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Sure, if by “right at him” you mean “past him and not actually at him.” Lying cunt.
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Oh Lord… You didn’t notice that one of Pelley’s chief points was that video clearly showed otherwise? That in fact it’s clearly visible in the video that ICE agent Ross was actually not directly in front of Good’s vehicle, and furthermore that Good’s front tires were cranked hard over to the right, away from Ross, to drive past him?
Or maybe, you’re the one who has trouble with telling the truth?
(To be fair, there’s a small chance that possibly you have trouble even perceiving the truth, when plain, clear evidence happens to conflict with the political narrative you’ve committed yourself to)?
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Aside:
You also need to learn not just what ‘left’ means, but what ‘leftist” means. The United States hasn’t had left-leaning broadcast media or mass media since before I was born (and I’m evidently much older than you).
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Why do you lie?
The nation saw the footage of her pulling away from the agents and the one opening fire on her for no reason (which is also a clear violation of policy).
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Because he’s a right-wing contrarian troll who could be shown footage of Trump admitting under oath in court to raping a woman (if such footage existed) and still say “he didn’t rape anyone and in fact Joe Biden raped three hundred women on live TV on the 6th of January 2021 so checkmate liberals”. His whole presence on this website—from his reflexive contrarianism to his inability to put forth any kind of credible argument to his use of ableist slurs—is only and specifically about trying to piss people off, which is weird as fuck.
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And the best/worst part is he isn’t even successful, but he keeps coming back anyway. Maybe this time Lucy won’t pull the football!
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My question was mainly rhetorical. I appreciate your explanation of the troll nonetheless.
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Just because you don’t question the narrative of your human centipede propaganda sources doesn’t mean it’s without question.
Your dear leader doesn’t read Techdirt, so you don’t have to do that performative two minutes hate thing here. Nobody questions that you’ll deny reality to prove you’re a good bootlicker.
A wealthy capitalist corporation is also an anarchist or socialist organization that advocates for the socialization of the means of production by…continuing to be a wealthy capitalist corporation?
Weiss once described herself as a liberal. That doesn’t make her a liberal. People aren’t their chosen label. They are their actions. And even then, she’s also called herself a “radical centrist” which is often a codeword for embarrassed or masking or disingenuous conservative. If you dine with fash, you are fash. Weiss has pushed official narratives from an authoritarian fascist government administration and been an apologist for violations of human and constitutional rights. I’ve pointed this out to you before. Conservatives pretend identity defines a person rather than actions. You think you’re a good person because you’re on the good guys team, so whatever you do is good. That’s a bullshit childish take, but hey, you’re simple, so it’s not surprising. When Weiss is on record vilifying citizens protesting against violations of human and constitutional rights, she is declaring by action that she is not remotely close to center, much less left. She could have a portrait of Mao in her office and that doesn’t make her actions magically communist. She could have a portrait of Lovecraft in her office and that doesn’t mean she’s a cult member of an elder god. People are what they do. You’re a racist, xenophobic genocidal asshole because that’s what you advocate for, regardless of who you think you are.
The media isn’t close to left-wing, much less “far-left.” Again, you don’t know what that term means.
And yet you continually come and interact here. The guy who hates sports doesn’t keep going to games.
Oh hey, so you’re leaving? Never coming back? If you think it’s the best policy, follow your own advice…?
Quite. Which is why you’re not at all concerned about what is being said here because it definitely has no chance of influencing anyone…
“I’m disregarding you! Hey, did you hear me? I’m really super disregarding you a lot now! Even more now!”
I love this for you. You found a scenario that confirms your confirmation bias, but only if you conflate leftists with liberals with Democrats with centrist corporate Democrats. It all makes sense if you ignore the details! Note, again, that you identity Platner as a Nazi based on his tattoo. I disagree with him as a candidate personally, but you’re identifying him as a Nazi. What Nazi policies of his can you cite though? If he fed the homeless, would you say feeding the homeless is fascism? Or maybe actions defines a person more than identity labels? If I claim I’m vegan but eat steak every night, would you say my actions are vegan in nature?
I’m not expecting you to coherently respond or really to respond at all. I’m just pointing out that you’re a simplistic moron who ironically thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room because he’s memorized all the propaganda shadows on his preferred cave wall. You’re a self-assured dumbfuck who cannot afford to accept that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is because it would be devastating to realize you’ve wasted so much fucking time clutching to this certainty. Sunk cost fallacy is a helluva drug.
I appreciate the precise use of “poisonous” here.
If it were venomous, you would first have to tempt the reporter into biting…
But poisonous is dangerous to you if you swallow it.
What I’d like to see more of in the dialogue and stories is addressing how actually dangerous these people are. They must be presented—and confronted—as the actual danger to a just and democratic society that they are. It’s not just some abstract question of ethics, morality, or “journalistic integrity”, which just treats this all like hand-wringing and only benefits the perpetrators.. But rather, in every instance, the actual harm to people (whether singularly, as a group, or the broader society) MUST be pointed out. It’s not doomerism when the stakes are actually high.
Thank you for saying that. People acting as if 60 Minutes was Mother Jones when it was more like New York Times with faces.
If only there had been established national laws regarding how the press is permitted to report instead of ‘why can’t everyone just’ journalism school guidelines that nobody follows.
If only there were laws enforcing the shunning of such frauds instead of just trusting people to shun them independently… which really isn’t different from having the government do it, except without the judge and jury existing as a ‘no’ button.
But no. Fascists are restricted to only use the most effective method of propaganda in existence: Buying media companies and burying the truth with lies… A form of propaganda that works especially well for them due to their wealth.
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Yeah because countries that have the kinds of laws you’re talking about haven’t been taken over by fascists who used those laws against the marginalized… oh wait…
You really have no fucking clue how the world works, do you?
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Which country is releasing more unbiased journalism, modern Scandinavia or modern USA?
Which country has a higher freedom of press index, modern Germany, or modern USA?
Which country has no laws that restrict journalism? The one with less freedom of the press?
How predictable.
When the teacher doesn’t restrict speech to protect the vulnerable in the classroom, freedom of expression is reduced.
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And when the teacher says only approved speakers may speak and can only speak in approved ways with approved facts and opinions, the same outcome happens. That seems to be what you’re suggesting should happen, though.
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Which of these countries have exactly the same laws and separation of powers as the USA?
None, which makes your “questioning” mostly irrelevant.
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Such laws could be used to force the press to report only one perspective (the government’s). The First Amendment precludes such bullshit for a reason.
How would that even work? Like, do you really want the government—especially this government—deciding who is and isn’t a “lawful” journalist?
Seriously, man, it’s kind of insane how you want to use fascist tactics to (supposedly) fight fascists. If I didn’t know better, and I may not, it almost feels like you’re trying to push for fascist control of the press.
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I’m sick of people saying “Something should be done” and then resisting to do ‘something’.
If you think something should be done, push for it, or at least don’t push for inaction in the face of things getting worse.
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And you’re falling into the trap of “something should be done, this is something, therefore it should be done”. My opposition to your suggestion lies entirely with how it sounds like you want government-approved reporting by government-approved reporters parroting government-approved facts and data and opinions. I know that’s a shitty idea. Why don’t you?
I’ll push for something to be done when the idea for what we might do isn’t one goosestep away from fascist bullshit. You got any better ideas other than an authoritarian takeover of the press?
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Oof… Should’ve stopped right there, hit delete and backed away from the keyboard.