Straight Down the Middle
Ask the people who aren't there anymore.
“I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views.”
That’s David Ellison in the New York Times on Tuesday, arguing that the man who wants to buy CNN can be trusted with it. He won’t have to, though. An owner who wants coverage moved doesn’t sit in the control room rewriting chyrons and personally spiking stories. He hires an editor who shares his ideological vision, and the editor hires the correspondents. Then those ideologically-aligned employees do all the things that determine which segments run, which stories never get reported out, which guests get booked, and how reality gets described to the public. All the while, the owner gets to spend the rest of his life accurately saying that he never put a finger on the scale — a phrase Ellison uses himself as his reason for having stayed quiet while a dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild sued to stop his $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Whether technically true or not, nobody has to take Ellison’s promise on faith, because he’s made the same promise before about a different newsroom (and we’re currently seeing how that’s been working out). Notably, there are two names that never appear in his op-ed. One is Bari Weiss. The other is Donald Trump, the president whose FCC approved Ellison’s last merger, and who said in December that it was “imperative that CNN be sold.”
So how should we look at Ellison’s op-ed? Let’s look at his record.
Everything he’s promising CNN, he already promised CBS News
When the FCC signed off on Ellison’s merger of Skydance with Paramount last July, it cited Skydance’s written commitment that CBS News’ reporting would be “fair, unbiased, and fact-based,” and that the company would hire an ombudsman to “evaluate complaints of bias.” Yes, the goal for reporting should be for it to be fair, unbiased, and fact-based. Of course. And hiring an ombudsman or public editor is a fine idea. But it quickly became clear what was really happening.
Kenneth Weinstein got the ombudsman job that September. From 2011 to 2020, he ran a neoconservative think tank called the Hudson Institute. In 2020, he was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, though the Senate never acted on his nomination. And in 2024, he gave $6,600 to Trump, $5,000 to the pro-Trump Save America PAC and $10,900 to the Republican National Committee, along with donations over the years to a number of individual Republicans.
But unlike a traditional ombudsman, who typically provides reporting to the public about the goings-on in the newsroom, story selection, how it’s being reported out, and so on, Weinstein doesn’t have a public-facing role. Instead, he is there to evaluate claims of bias and raise his concerns with Paramount’s president and television head, who will then take them to the president of CBS News. Basically, Weinstein’s role is making sure that CBS News remains sufficiently pro-Trump for the president’s liking. Cool.
In October, Ellison brought on Bari Weiss, naming her the editor-in-chief of CBS News, after Paramount bought her Free Press media company for a reported $150 million. Sure, with zero TV news experience under her belt, she was unbelievably unqualified for this new role that had been created specifically for her. But she seems to have been brought on to remake CBS News in the image of her “anti-woke” Free Press more than to actually run a successful news company. When announcing her hire, Ellison said something that he’d echo in this op-ed 10 months later: “We believe the majority of the country longs for news that is balanced and fact-based, and we want CBS to be their home.”
In May, magazine writer and documentary producer with no TV news experience Nick Bilton was hired to be the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. By the end of the month, longtime 60 Minutes correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were gone, and Scott Pelley a week or so after that, fired for telling Bilton he was “murdering” the program. Upon his exit, Pelley shared a note to Instagram:
“For my part, 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 honest journalism 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.
At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of my colleagues at CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and I must leave as well.
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.”
Pelley told the New York Times that in the wake of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killings, Weiss emailed then-60 Minutes Executive Producer Tanya Simon, instructing her to make protesters look more violent in the story and to describe Good as driving toward the officer who shot her. This was all despite the fact that Pelley and his team had already taken steps to “identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive,” to “find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.” He was already taking steps to both sides the extrajudicial murder of American citizens. It still wasn’t enough for Weiss. “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before,” said Pelley in the Times piece.
Vega shared her own thoughts on the ideological takeover of 60 Minutes in a note shared with the New York Times:
“I was fired today. My contract as a correspondent for 60 Minutes was not set to expire until March 2027.
I have the utmost respect and admiration for my colleagues at 60 Minutes and the stories that air every Sunday. But I very much fear what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.
In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. 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. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.
I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience, a phrase I borrow from a colleague who has also fought to keep questionable editorial suggestions away from the facts. 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?”
I am proud of the work I did for 60 Minutes. This season alone I was part of teams that won two of the highest honors in our profession — a George Polk award and a duPont-Columbia award for our coverage of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s Cecot prison. And not for nothing, I climbed to Mount Everest.
I also walk away with an honor no one can take from me: I was the first Latina correspondent to ever be on 60 Minutes.
Today I lost an amazing job. But I still have my integrity.
To my former colleagues, continue to hold the line.
In June, Writers Guild of America East president Tom Fontana issued a statement:
“Like many of you, I have been alarmed by recent developments at CBS News. In the past year, CBS has enacted cruel and needless layoffs across the organization and shuttered CBS News Radio. In addition, based on a string of public reporting and confidential reports from WGAE members, it is clear that CBS brass is engaged in a near-constant level of editorial interference that would have previously been unthinkable.
Over the course of the last few weeks, CBS has laid off or fired multiple newsroom workers and journalists, most recently Scott Pelley; CBS management is apparently too thin-skinned to handle the honest scrutiny of their own journalists.”
Vega, on stage at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in New Orleans last month, described being pushed by management to falsely report that the mayor of Minneapolis had directed his police to confront federal immigration agents. She’d also been told to find footage of protesters attacking undercover ICE agents. Her team went looking, but again, this wasn’t a thing. In 25 years of journalism, she said that “never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”
You probably already know about the CECOT segment, which Weiss pulled just hours before broadcast, airing a month later but only after it had leaked online. And Pelley talked about the meddling in the Good and Pretti stories. But just this week, we learned about a new example of editorial interference. Apparently, before her firing, Alfonsi had been working on a story for 60 Minutes about an investigation being led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) into Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to a number of banks. It was spiked by Weiss.
From a piece in The American Prospect:
“Wyden’s report also details multiple instances in which powerful figures used their positions to obstruct his investigation. In one glaring example, he described CBS suppressing an interview he did with former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March. That was five months after David Ellison, a Trump ally and child of billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS through its parent company Paramount and appointed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss to run the network.
Wyden discussed his [suspicious activity reports] investigation with Alfonsi, and possible consequences for banks, as part of a larger segment on the conduct of Wall Street bankers and the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Weiss fired Alfonsi once Ellison took over. “David Ellison’s handpicked partisan lieutenant killed the segment and fired the lead reporter on the piece,” Wyden told the Prospect.
The experience gave Wyden ‘a first-hand view of how the far-right takeover of corporate media is protecting predators and standing in the way of justice … Blocking corporate media consolidation and supporting independent media is absolutely vital to defending our democracy and getting justice for ultra-wealthy criminals.’”
CBS says it’s “proud of our aggressive and extensive reporting on the Epstein scandal,” that it is continuing its reporting, and called Wyden’s claims “categorically false.” Okay, sure.
Luckily for Ellison, Weiss, and the rest of the management over at CBS News (and possibly CNN before long), the supply of these types of embarrassing stories will eventually run dry. As Vega explained in her exit note, teams had “held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.” That’s a big part of how censorship works. It’s about what stories we don’t tell as much as the ones we do. Eventually, anyone truly bothered by the censorship will leave and be replaced by someone who fits the ideological mold.
We’re watching the installation of the right-wing apparatus. It’s loud. It’s clumsy. It leaks. But over time, it’ll become quiet, where the meddling is invisible because it’s built in. CBS News is in the process of being irrevocably corrupted, and CNN could be next.