Scott Pelley Details Weiss 'Push to Air 'State Propaganda' on CBS News

Days after being fired from the CBS News program '60 Minutes' for speaking out against the dismissal of several top correspondents and declaring that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was "brought in to kill" the show, veteran journalist Scott Pelley described in detail the right-wing former opinion columnist's efforts to push for political coverage that centered the White House's point of view—regardless of the facts.

"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," Pelley told The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro Sunday.

Pelley was interviewed after he and his former colleagues spoke out against what fired correspondent Cecilia Vega called "censorship" at the 58-year-old program since Weiss took the helm of CBS News last year. Weiss was installed following a White House-approved merger of parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, owned by the son of President Donald Trump backer Larry Ellison.

The new editor-in-chief, who first gained notoriety as a student at Columbia University when she led a campaign against pro-Palestinian professors and later railed against "cancel culture," arrived at CBS last fall with promises to promote "journalism that reports on the world as it actually is" and that is "fair, fearless, and factual."

But in his interview with the Times, Pelley expanded on his earlier accusation, made in a statement released last week after he was fired, that Weiss had demanded that he "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story"—revealing that the coverage in question dealt with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.

Good was shot in her car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after several officers gave her conflicting instructions, and footage of the shooting showed an agent approaching the front of her vehicle as she turned the wheel to the right. Pretti was shot by Customs and Border Protection agents in another incident, after he approached a woman one officer had thrown to the ground. Top administration officials accused both victims of being violent and called Good a "domestic terrorist" while barring state officials from investigating the killings.

Pelley said that before Weiss intervened in the coverage of the fatal shootings, he had pushed to use images "in which we see the protesters acting aggressively."

"I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations," he told Garcia-Navarro. "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."

But Pelley's push to get ahead of any criticism that '60 Minutes' was being biased against the agents or the Trump administration didn't stop Weiss from emailing the show's executive producer hours before the story was set to air, asking that producers "make the protesters look more violent" and even promote a false claim about Good that was pushed by the White House.

Pelley said the message from Weiss was, "You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."

"This is not what you see on the video," Pelley told Garcia-Navarro. "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."

Pelley said he refused to make the changes, and did not hear from Weiss about the piece after it aired. A CBS spokesperson told the Times that the suggestions Weiss had made "had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible."

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro: "My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough."

The story on Pretti and Good came weeks after Weiss pushed the show's producers and correspondents to change a segment on Trump's deal with El Salvador under which hundreds of immigrants have been deported to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center after being falsely accused of being gang members.

Pelley's revelation about the exchange with Weiss was called "devastating" by The Hill reporter Niall Stanage, while the grassroots progressive group Our Revolution said Pelley had described "a CBS News editor demanding reporters change facts to match Trump’s version of events to help justify the murder of a US citizen.

"That isn’t news. It’s state propaganda," said the group. "Bari Weiss is not a journalist. She is an asset of the Trump administration. She should be sued and removed and Paramount should answer for installing her."

Scottish historian William Dalrymple added that Pelley's interview revealed Weiss as "a major threat to truthful journalism."

The chaos at CBS has intensified as Paramount Skydance has pushed for a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN—raising alarm that the cable network could soon see a significant shift toward reporting that blatantly centers the White House's viewpoints.