menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Fired Journalist Says Bari Weiss Pushed to Air Propaganda on CBS News

24 0
08.06.2026

Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

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.

“60 Minutes” Correspondent Pelley Calls Out CBS Execs for........

© Truthout