Trump and television divide CBS newsroom

Is 60 Minutes all that good anymore? That question is one of the subtexts of the latest explosion at CBS News, where the new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled the plug Sunday night on a planned feature about Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a notorious El Salvadorian prison.

Weiss, in a memo first published by Axios Monday, had pointed out that The New York Times and others had already exposed the “horrific” conditions at the prison, known as CECOT. “We need to advance it,” she wrote. What’s more, the piece didn’t do enough to capture the White House’s point of view, she wrote: “We need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.”

Weiss is operating in the shadow of network owner David Ellison’s public courtship of President Donald Trump, and his public argument that his attempt to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery will face fewer regulatory challenges. So neither her staff nor many critics have given her the benefit of the doubt that she’s trying to push for better journalism, rather than simply putting a thumb on the scale for the administration. Hours after her segment was shelved, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi shared a scathing email to staff in which she accused CBS of bowing to political pressure from the Trump White House.

But there’s another thread of mutual distaste running through the conflict.

Many members of the CBS News team — survivors of years of bitter internal politics, and operators of the most successful remaining newsmagazine in television — are skeptical of Weiss’ background in opinion journalism, not hard news, and appalled by her total lack of experience in the painstaking work of producing television, compressing a vast amount of information down into a few gripping minutes.

Meanwhile, people on both sides of the divide say Weiss and her senior leaders have brought a newspaper journalist’s sometimes patronizing attitude to television broadcasting. Historically, some newspaper journalists have dismissed television news as a medium devoted to reading yesterday’s New York Times stories aloud and landing the occasional big-ticket interview. By these standards, even highly-watched 60 Minutes segments rarely amount to much that isn’t already in the newspaper.

For instance: The notion that a new report should “advance” the story might sound obvious at The New York Times. But a regular viewer of 60 Minutes would know that’s hardly among the criteria for making the program, which lives and dies in part by the power of its interviews, storytelling, and its visuals, not always totally new information.

Weiss had other, more granular concerns about Sunday’s spiked segment as well, Semafor has learned. In particular, a person familiar with the editorial process said, she asked about whether the network should refer to individuals detained as “illegals,” or “illegal immigrants,” instead of “migrants,” as the broadcast planned.

A statement from CBS News Sunday evening said the 60 Minutes segment will run at a later date. The piece could still run as soon as next Sunday, though the holiday schedule and the attention to the saga are likely to slow down the reporting process.