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Scott Pelley Details Weiss' Push to Air 'State Propaganda' on CBS News
"She was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president."
Jun 08, 2026
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 a devastating interview.
Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.
Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened. pic.twitter.com/Kh56P1q7rM
— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) June 7, 2026
"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.
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Fight the Trump Media Takeover With Tax Credits for Independent Reporting
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
Jun 05, 2026
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle "60 Minutes" and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially "60 Minutes," did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
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Lessons in Resistance From Scott Pelley
We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
Jun 05, 2026
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."
Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
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Fired Scott Pelley Says '60 Minutes' Under Bari Weiss Wanted 'Falsehoods and Bias' Injected
"Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc," said the veteran journalist as his 37-career with CBS News came to an end.
Jun 03, 2026
Fired by the network where he had worked for nearly four decades on Tuesday night, veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley said in a statement that he had been directed by the new management team at CBS News, led by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, "to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story" and also "told to include assertions that are unverified" in his reporting.
What looks like the collapse of "60 Minutes" has played out both behind closed doors at the network in recent months and publicly, with a series of high-profile firings of other longtime journalists and producers at the show. Details of internal meetings have been leaked, revealing serious tension between veteran members of the nation's most-watched television news magazine and Weiss' new management team.
“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable,” Pelley said in his statement, released just hours after Nick Bilton, the show's new executive producer appointed by Weiss last month, announced the firing. “The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well."
Bilton said in his statement that Pelley had been “terminated for cause effective immediately," following a contentious staff meeting on Monday in which Pelley accused Weiss, who was not at the meeting, of being "brought in to kill" the program, not save it.
Despite "repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend" and earlier on Tuesday, Bilton said, his efforts "to find common ground" with Pelley were not successful. "That was not the path Scott chose," he said.
Pelley's narrative of events was starkly different.
"Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause," Pelley said in a statement sent to several news outlets. "Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos."
“For my part," he continued, "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. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley concluded: “I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”
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CBS Firings Called 'Straight From an Authoritarian Handbook' and Preview of Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
The pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond," warned several press freedom groups.
Jun 02, 2026
A coalition of nine press freedom groups on Tuesday warned that last week's firings of top journalists at CBS News' "60 Minutes" were a "grotesque effort taken straight from an authoritarian handbook"—but emphasized that the dismissal of reporters who had pushed back against the Trump administration signaled danger for journalists across the media, particularly as a pending merger would hand control of CNN to the same billionaire family that how runs CBS.
The Coalition for Women in Journalism, Common Cause, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders were among the groups that released a statement saying the firing of "60 Minutes" correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega—as well as two top executives—were meant to "appease a sitting president and dismantle one of the loudest voices in investigative journalism."
But the groups emphasized that "this is only the beginning," considering the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery recently voted in support of a $110 billion proposed merger with Paramount Skydance, owned by David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump megadonor Larry Ellison. The deal could be finalized as soon as July.
Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, and media critics have warned the network could be headed for the same loss of editorial independence that CBS has faced since right-wing former opinion columnist took the helm of the latter network last year following the Paramount Skydance merger.
Since then, newly appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has pulled from the air a "60 Minutes" segment that questioned the Trump administration's explanation for the deportation of hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison, personally booked guests for news programs, and called for programming that appeals to "centrist" viewers.
"Bari Weiss’ shameless actions fulfill the Ellisons’ commitment to President Trump to remake CBS to his liking," said the groups on Tuesday. "Larry Ellison has reportedly promised to do the same at CNN if allowed to take control through the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Not because it makes any business sense, but because they seek to control the public discourse."
"We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
The groups noted that the firings of Alfonsi, Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich came as more than 200 journalists and documentarians signed an open letter opposing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, citing concerns that the deal "would open the door to improper political meddling in journalists’ editorial decisions," and noting that according to The Wall Street Journal, David Ellison has "promised President Donald Trump 'sweeping changes' at Warner-owned CNN—a frequent target of Trump’s ire."
"Ellison will likely alter CNN’s editorial direction (not to mention meddle with HBO’s documentaries) to be more friendly to the administration, threatening press freedom," said the signatories, including Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hasan, and Alfonsi.
A separate letter organized by Democracy Defenders Fund has garnered signatures from over 1,000 actors, producers, directors, screenwriters, and other entertainment professionals.
"This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it," reads the letter, which calls for state attorneys general to block the merger. "The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major US film studios to just four."
On Tuesday, the press freedom groups warned that the merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond, and should not be allowed to move forward."
"We cannot let this blow to the bedrock of our democracy be lost in the constant barrage of scandal, corruption, and abuse of power," said the organizations. "We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
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'She Was Brought in to Kill' 60 Minutes: Scott Pelley Unleashes on Bari Weiss at CBS Meeting
The journalist confronted newly installed executive editor Nick Bilton over the recent firings of two reporters and two top executives.
Jun 01, 2026
Veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley took aim at the qualifications and intentions of CBS News' right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, on Monday at an explosive staff meeting that was meant to introduce employees of the 57-year-old news show to its newly appointed executive producer days after several journalists were fired in what Pelley referred to as "Black Thursday."
Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist who first gained notoriety for campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University and went on to rail against "woke" progressives and "cancel culture," appointed tech journalist Nick Bilton to lead the program last week after firing two executives and two top correspondents.
Bilton opened the meeting by reading some prepared remarks, but Pelley quickly cut in to tell the new producer that he had "many questions" about the dismissals of reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
"I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?" Pelley asked Bilton, his voice reportedly "shaking in anger" at times. "What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?"
Alfonsi and Vega won a prestigious journalism award for a story on President Donald Trump's deal with El Salvador to send immigrants to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the abuse detainees have suffered there, and the fact that many of those deported to the prison have not been convicted of crimes and have been falsely accused of being members of violent gangs.
The story was pulled from the air last December after Weiss complained that it hadn't covered the Trump administration's perspective, garnering accusations of censorship, and eventually aired with some editing.
Pelley suggested on Monday that such decisions revealed Weiss' intentions for the broadcast as a whole.
“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes.’ She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job."
"The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic," he added, "so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
'CBS Evening News' has had declining viewership, "often below 4 million viewers a night," according to NPR, with the broadcast "flagging" since Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor.
Media critics have warned that Weiss appears to be "running the Trump playbook" at CBS, as Sophia Tesfaye wrote at Salon last week: "Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform—fairness, innovation, a new direction—and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket."
Weiss took the helm of CBS after parent company Paramount's merger with Skydance, owned by the son of tech billionaire and Trump backer Larry Ellison.
Charles Forelle, the managing editor of CBS News and a close associate of Weiss, repeatedly attempted to steer Monday's meeting away from Pelley's criticism of Bilton and the new direction "60 Minutes" appears to be taking, saying at one point that Pelley's line of questioning was "not actually productive."
"It's working for me," replied Pelley.
After Pelley said the network's leadership had been "cruel" in firing veteran journalists from the show, Forelle accused him of being "rude."
"I'm not being rude," he shot back. "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at 5:00. Sending Draggon Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because no one could look him in the eye. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi's contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega's contract. Just calling them up and telling them they were fired. That's rude."
"This is a conversation," Pelley added. "That is rude, and you were part of that."
Alfonsi's contract with "60 Minutes" was not renewed; Vega was dismissed despite her contract not being up until 2027. The two journalists spoke out about their firings, with Alfonsi saying, "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
Vega said that "in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories."
"60 Minutes" employees applauded Pelley on Monday after Bilton left the meeting, and observers praised the veteran journalist for defending the show and the work of its staffers.
"Scott Pelley told the truth today," said Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. "We need independent media the right wing can't buy."
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'Let's Call This What It Is: Censorship': Fired '60 Minutes' Journalists Speak Out
Cecilia Vega, one of several journalists ousted from the show, said many of her colleagues "have had to fight to maintain editorial independence" under CBS News' new Trump-aligned corporate owners.
May 29, 2026
A group of veteran “60 Minutes” journalists was fired on Thursday as CBS News’ recently installed right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, moves to reshape the network in her image. Some of the ousted employees are describing their mass firing as a clear act of political “censorship.”
News had already broken earlier this week that correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was on the way out after more than ten years on the flagship news program, after she'd publicly criticized Weiss' decision to delay her story on the Trump administration's deportation of immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran torture prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), late last year.
But Alfonsi's departure was rumored to be part of a larger shakeup by Weiss, who has been accused of molding the network into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration following the government-approved acquisition of CBS's parent company, Paramount, by billionaire David Ellison, owner of Skydance.
On Thursday, the hammer finally fell. In addition to the formal firing of Alfonsi, The Washington Post reported that Weiss had also fired Tanya Simon, who’d worked on the show for a quarter-century and had recently taken on the role of executive producer. Correspondent Cecilia Vega—who had also covered CECOT for the network before Weiss' arrival—was canned as well, even though her contract was not set to expire until March 2027. So was executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski said the firings were the result of them “building a show that thrives in the 21st century.”
“That requires a new approach,” they said, outlining their goals of “expanding ‘60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined ‘60 Minutes’ at its best.”
To fill the role of executive producer, Weiss brought in a network outsider, Nick Bilton, a former technology columnist at The New York Times and producer of documentaries for HBO and Netflix. Weiss called him “one of the most entrepreneurial journalists of our time and the perfect leader for one of the most entrepreneurial news brands of all time.”
Though Weiss reportedly viewed Simon as a “bad leader” who “couldn’t control the staff,” according to one source who spoke anonymously with The New York Post, Simon announced her departure with warm words for those who’d continue working on “60 Minutes.”
“While leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter—I want to be unequivocally clear about one thing: It has been an immense privilege to lead this broadcast, and I could not be prouder of what we have built, fought for, and delivered together over the last year," Simon said in a statement published Thursday. "'60 Minutes' has always been more than just a broadcast: It is an institution built on independence, grit, and rigorous search for the truth.“
But Vega gave a more candid explanation for her and her colleagues' firings.
"In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories," she said in a statement Thursday. "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," she continued. "It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."
Vega's criticisms mirror those made earlier this week by Alfonsi, who said her firing was "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting."
In December, Weiss abruptly pulled Alfonsi's story featuring the testimony of some of the men who were tortured in the CECOT prison shortly before it was set to air, citing a lack of commentary in the segment from Trump administration officials, who had repeatedly ignored the journalists’ requests for an interview. At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss had effectively given the government a “kill switch” on critical reporting. The segment eventually went to air the next month with some editing.
Following her ouster on Thursday, Vega described her own efforts to oppose what she viewed as politically-motivated meddling by network higher-ups.
"I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience," she said. "I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity."
“I am far from the only ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?'" Vega added.
She said she was proud of her work at '60 Minutes' and cited her reporting on CECOT for the program, which won a DuPont Columbia journalism award, as one of her finest achievements.
Weiss' overhaul of '60 Minutes' comes as Ellison eyes the merger of Paramount with another major media conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
President Donald Trump has said it's “imperative” that any acquisition of Warner Bros. includes CNN and has publicly denounced a rival bid for the company by Netflix.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice appeared ready to approve a $110 billion takeover by Paramount following meetings with Ellison and other company executives.
A group of journalists—including tech reporter Kara Swisher, former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, and NBC News legal analyst Katie Phang—warned at an event hosted earlier this week by a coalition of press freedom groups that, especially in the wake of Alfonsi's firing, the government-approved consolidation of media posed a dangerous threat to the future of journalistic freedom.
“I think what’s happening right now is pretty dangerous,” Acosta said. “To essentially announce the departure of Sharyn Alfonsi from 60 Minutes is a very in-your-face move by some people who don’t care very much about the First Amendment.”
“Folks need to use a little bit of their imagination here to recognize what may be coming down the pike,” he said, warning that the Trump administration was building a “strange oligarchical empire… attempting to do state media.”
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Veteran 60 Minutes Journalist Says 'Wall Has Come Down Between Editorial Independence and Corporate Interests'
"Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not," said Sharyn Alfonsi, who spoke out last year against Bari Weiss’ censorship of a segment on the Trump administration’s use of a Salvadoran torture prison.
May 27, 2026
A veteran "60 Minutes" journalist says CBS News' new right-wing corporate ownership is pushing her out of the network for "refusing to sanitize accurate reporting" that offends the Trump administration.
The contract at the network for Sharyn Alfonsi—a correspondent who has contributed to CBS's flagship news show since 2015—expired on Saturday, according to the New York Times, six months after the network's editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, abruptly pulled a segment Alfonsi had reported about the Trump administration's use of the notorious Salvadoran torture prison CECOT to detain immigrants deported without due process.
At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss—the former head of the right-wing Free Press who'd been installed just months earlier by CBS's new owner, the Trump-aligned billionaire David Ellison—had spiked her segment for "political" reasons, identifying it as an act of "corporate censorship."
On Wednesday, she confirmed in a statement that her more than 20 years working on the show would be "drawing to a close." She said her efforts to communicate with the network about renewing her contract following the dispute "were met with absolute silence from network executives."
"The message could not be clearer," she said. "My time at '60 Minutes' is apparently over."
"In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like 'modernization' and 'restructuring' to explain away my departure," she said. "Don't be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom."
The "60 Minutes" piece included interviews with some of the more than 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men sent to the prison camp by the Trump administration last year, the vast majority of whom had no criminal records, according to CBS.
n those interviews, the men described being subjected to degrading torture on a daily basis, being deprived of basic food, water, and medical care, and being completely cut off from their families and legal representatives.
Weiss claimed she halted the story because it did not include interviews with White House, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security officials behind the policy, which the journalists had repeatedly requested without response. Alfonsi said that by letting their silence act as a veto, Weiss was effectively giving the government a "kill-switch" for inconvenient reporting.
Following widespread criticism both within the network and from the public, the CECOT segment aired in full a month later, though it included more caveats emphasizing the administration's allegations that the detainees had gang affiliations and downplayed the lack of violent convictions.
The apparent ouster of Alfonsi this week comes as Weiss is reportedly pushing for a “shakeup” of “60 Minutes” similar to those she’s made to “CBS Evening News” and other programming.
Critics have noted the markedly more hawkish tone the network has taken under Weiss in favor of President Donald Trump's regime change wars in Venezuela and Iran, while giving Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ample uninterrupted airtime to justify the bombardments of Gaza and Lebanon with little note of the resulting humanitarian catastrophes.
According to reporting in Puck earlier this month, some sources at CBS believe that Alfonsi's departure could spawn a wave of resignations from the network.
"Fearless, independent reporting has always been the defining standard at 60 Minutes," Alfonsi said on Wednesday. "Today, CBS management is abandoning that mission, choosing access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it."
"The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down," she added. "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
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Waterboarding for Dollars in Cuba
What the United States is doing to Cubans is equivalent to waterboarding them into submission, and all CBS could seem to talk about is Castro.
May 14, 2026
The CBS Sunday Morning program, “Next: Cuba?” which aired on April 26, presented a discussion of the recent intensification of sanctions on and threats against Cuba. I am disappointed that this program, and several other shorter recent segments on CBS News, did not cover some essential points that must be stated about what is happening in Cuba now. My own experience in Cuba, including the recent delivery of humanitarian aid directly to Cubans, contradicts some perspectives presented by CBS.
Fidel Castro is dead. And, he has been dead for a while. He was a fascinating character who still inspires polemic discussions. Stories of Fidel are legendary on the scale of Paul Bunyan. But we think the choice of focus of these eight minutes on Fidel’s legacy is unjust to the Cuban people. The news of the moment is that Cuba is underwater. The CBS Sunday Morning program, instead of engaging in a discussion of a crisis on the island, entertained us with old, mostly obsolete stories about Castro.
Cubans are suffering currently. The US sanctions on Cuba are enormous, by any measure. We find it remarkable that Cuba has withstood for decades sanctions that would bring down any other country of its size and reach within weeks. The recent fossil fuel blockade on the island, however, has placed the people of the island in a choke hold. Cuba’s economy, like those around the world, is dependent on petroleum products for most of its electricity generation, vehicle use, and cooking. Food is rotting in the fields because of a lack of fuel to connect products to markets, and it is rotting in homes because the refrigerators are disconnected.
The recent military blockade prohibiting oil shipments disrupted Cuba’s economy on a level that frightened people, in a way that we would compare to drowning; If something is not done quickly, disaster will occur. The blockade was challenged successfully by a Russian oil tanker, but the sabers from the US State Department continue to rattle loudly.
Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US.
A health crisis is happening in real time. The impacts of the sanctions on health are huge. Cubans are accustomed to excellent health services, but hospitals are less able to provide services than ever. Infants who were once saved from preventable risks are now dying, even in the best hospitals. Surgeries are postponed, simply because there are not sufficient provisions, made acute by the recent oil blockade. Let’s be clear: The oil blockade has provoked an epidemiological disaster.
The current suffering has a psychological dimension. A refrigerator that won’t keep food fresh, a stove that won’t cook, darkness all day and night, no transport to the workplace or market, overflowing trash piles every few blocks because the garbage trucks have no fuel, no running water, are not the same as a fun camping trip. Cubans are humiliated as the system they depend on spiraled downward from weakly working to a horror show. The people of Cuba are frightened, in our opinion, not only by the capacity of the US government to cause mayhem, but by their own vulnerability. All Cubans heard President Donald Trump say that he will “take Cuba." Cubans know what happened in Iran, Gaza, and Venezuela, and these words are designed to make them think they are next. The psychological impact of this pressure compounds the physical hardship.
The intent of the current administration can’t be missing the mark—the effect of the fuel blockade, on top of so many, layered, sanctions and complications, is the same as waterboarding a person. By strengthening the intensity and increasing the duration, a waterboarded subject will eventually stop resisting and walk calmly to the next waterboarding session. That waterboarding may have occurred in Guantánamo, on the same island as the 10 million victims of these sanctions, is ironic. Even now, with a Russian tanker arriving to provide only a portion of the Cuban needs, the US government continues the horror of a tightened blockade to convert Cuba into a compliant state.
Cuban voices should be heard. The positions of Cuban Americans regarding the US sanctions on the island are not unanimous, as the news segment might lead one to believe. Americans should realize that Cuban Americans hold diverse positions on how representative the Cuban government is and how responsive it is to the changing situations regarding the needs of Cubans. This is not reflected in the mentioned segment.
More importantly, not a single Cuban citizen on the island spoke in the CBS Sunday Morning program. Even when including the other recent CBS News segments, very little expression of sentiment on the island is found. The viewers may be surprised, not only by the diversity of positions held among Cubans, but also by their sophistication in the analysis of the role of the Cuban government and the US government in their lives. Cubans don’t need to be represented by a few voices from inside Miami: They can speak for themselves, but the mentioned news item definitely cut them out of the conversation.
Cuba deserves sovereignty. The mentioned program made no mention of the overwhelming castigation of the US sanctions against Cuba that have occurred around the world. The United Nations votes against US sanctions have been occurring yearly for a few decades. Numerous countries are pushing back against the US line on Cuba. Russia dared the US to stop its fuel tankers from supplying the island. Small and large countries alike, ranging from Sri Lanka to Brazil, from Belgium to China, are speaking out against the US sanctions against Cuba. Many are putting their money where their mouth is, with donations and technical assistance, including many organizations and individuals from the US. Their message is simple: Cuba deserves self-determination, not intervention from abroad. They do not deserve the web of financial, travel, commercial, and diplomatic punishments imposed on Cuba and on any business or country that dares to conduct some kinds of business with Cuba.
Cuba is not a threat to any other country or people. It is amply evident that Cuba is not a danger to any group or people or nation outside its country. Even the most stridently anti-communist Cuban Americans travel to Cuba freely. The State Sponsor of Terrorism designation of Cuba, one of the pillars justifying US sanctions, is neither accurate nor helpful. Discussion of this was absent from the mentioned news article, leaving the viewer with a deficient view of why Cubans and their government face our collective wrath.
There are problems inside the country. There are serious problems in both Cuba and the US, both of which need sober, thoughtful discussions. Let’s all be clear: Discontent rages in the US, too. However, no yardstick exists that makes Cuba look like an outlier in either internal human rights or international threats. What does exist is the cry of “but they are communists,” coming from South Florida, and this has no place as a criterion for US foreign policy any longer. And recently, the Cuban government has called for frank discussions with the US government, hopefully, where all issues could be discussed in a framework of sovereignty and the intentions of being good neighbors.
Cubans are capable of handling their own problems, with our cooperation instead of imposition. We all would like to see Cubans happier. We have varying levels of knowledge about Cuba, ranging from first-time visitors to Cuba to citizens and former residents of the island. Our political opinions vary along a wide range, but we are unanimous in one aspect that was left out of the CBS Sunday Morning program: Cuba needs and deserves an end to the US-imposed sanctions.
Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US. The CBS Sunday Morning article left out the voices of Cubans, which would have expressed their anxious desire for what now seems impossible: that Cubans be able to conduct their business without undue pressure from the US. Practically no Cuban alive is old enough to know what normal diplomacy from the US is. Let’s give them the most revolutionary present of all—a decent, respectful foreign policy, just like all the rest of the countries in the world.
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In Cuba, US Media Only Films the Darkness
The real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel.
May 02, 2026
When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness.
They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.
They come for the darkness.
A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place 90 miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these cameras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.
If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of US sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148% from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.
Read that again. Babies.
The report links the rise to the tightening of unilateral US coercive measures under the first Donald Trump administration, the continuation of most of those measures under Joe Biden, and further escalation under the second Trump administration. Instead of telling that story, prime-time segments like CBS recycle Cold War clichés.
In this segment, people are invited to remember prerevolutionary Cuba as a lost paradise. But beyond the casino lights were cane cutters; domestic workers; rural families without doctors; children without schools; Black Cubans denied the full rights, dignity, and opportunities the government claimed to promise; workers, surviving in an economy where much of the wealth flowed upward. For many Cubans, the revolution was a rupture with dependency.
It is common in US media to shrink the Cuban Revolution into one beard, one speech, one man. As if millions of lives, shaped by inequality, dictatorship, and foreign domination, could be reduced to nothing more than a personality cult. Fidel Castro was central to Cuba’s history, but so were peasants who wanted land, teachers who crossed mountains to teach literacy, doctors who stayed in poor neighborhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.
Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic errors exist. Frustration is real. Emigration is real. And yet, these realities are routinely seized upon by Washington as the ready-made justification for intervention, pressure, and policies that deepen the very conditions they claim to condemn.
For decades, the United States has built an external wall around the island brick by brick. Sanctions. Financial penalties. Shipping restrictions. Fuel pressure. Banking obstacles. Threats against companies that trade. Punishments for third countries. Obstacles to medicine, parts, credit, investment, and entrepreneurs. Policy papers described the logic openly generations ago: Create hardship, provoke desperation, generate political unrest.
This is where media like CBS plays a critical role by showing the suffering while obscuring the system that produces it. By rendering US policy as background noise rather than as an active force shaping the very reality being filmed. And this is not an isolated editorial choice. It is a pattern.
But when infant deaths rise sharply during a period of intensified external strangulation, honesty demands more than repeating those talking points. It requires naming cause and responsibility. And it requires asking a more uncomfortable question: If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?
You don’t spend decades trying to suffocate something that poses no alternative. Why isolate, sanction, and punish a model you believe is irrelevant? Unless the fear is not that it will fail. Unless the fear is that it might, even with all its contradictions, suggest a different way of organizing society. One where people are not reduced to clients, markets, or consumers to be captured, but honored as human beings to be nourished, protected, and allowed to flourish.
When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbors calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.
Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalized preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.
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