’60 Minutes’ staff bristles at basic editorial standards
By: Becket Adams (The Hill)
Reporting without editorial review and oversight is not journalism.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
If you're a normal, well-adjusted adult with family and friends, chances are you've heard nothing about the umpteenth mutiny at "60 Minutes."
But if you're just now recovering from the holiday and checking the trending news headlines, you might find it interesting that CBS News' flagship program has devolved somehow into a fiefdom subject to petty turf-wars. Efforts by the new management to enforce even mild editorial standards are being met with cries to heaven of the sort unheard since Herod received his first Christmas greeting.
Whatever you've heard lately about "60 Minutes" and a supposed attack on the free press, know that the truth is simple: CBS staffers are upset because the network's editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, held a story until final touches could be added. That's it.
That's the whole so-called crisis, brought to you by "60 Minutes," which lately breaks very little news unless it's about "60 Minutes."
Weiss explained in an internal memo on Dec. 21 that a segment by CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi lacked several key elements — among other things, an original response from the Trump administration. The segment, titled "Inside CECOT," investigates the deportation of illegal aliens from the U.S. to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
"What we have is [White House Press Secretary] Karoline Leavitt's soundbite claiming [the deported illegal immigrants] are evildoers in America," Weiss told staffers. "But isn't there much more to ask in light of the torture we're revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don't tend to be shy. I realize we've emailed the DHS [spokesperson], but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record."
Good journalists understand that this is a common request good editors make. Good reporting includes both sides of the story, and simply emailing a request for comment at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday, or the recycling of an already-public statement, is usually insufficient. A thorough reporter wants something exclusive — usually an on-the-record comment, especially when competing news outlets have already covered much of the same ground.
This leads us to the actual media scandal hidden in plain sight.
In the "60 Minutes" segment that Weiss paused for further reporting, Alfonsi, known for shoddy and biased work in the past, explicitly stated that "the Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview." However, even this statement was highly misleading. Homeland Security had provided an original, on-the-record comment for the story. So had the White House and the State Department. These comments and even the fact of their existence were all omitted from Alfonsi's report, which implied that the administration had no specific response at all.
Note also that it might be valuable from a journalistic perspective to get a quote from someone like the outspoken Steven Miller attempting to justify torture of prisoners. If Weiss wants to let the White House explain itself, it's certainly not because the outcome is guaranteed to favor Trump.
This lack of effort, and the gap between reality and CBS's reporting would be sufficient justification to pause the story on its own, but there's more.
Weiss also expressed concerns about the segment's claim that nearly half of the deported illegal immigrants lack criminal histories. This glosses over the reality that half do have histories, and it also hides the ball about precisely what counts as a "criminal history." According to the segment, for example, only eight of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT had been sentenced for crimes in the U.S. But how many have convictions of any sort? How many were deported while facing charges in U.S. courts? How many were wanted abroad? "My point," Weiss wrote, "is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals."
These entirely reasonable editorial requests for more reported context prompted someone at CBS (likely Alfonsi) to leak to the media that Weiss had "spiked" the CECOT story, that network staffers are facing "corporate censorship" to appease the Trump White House, and that their First Amendment freedoms are under attack.
"Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," Alfonsi wrote. But that's not necessarily an endorsement. Both CBS attorneys and the Standards and Practices desk screened and cleared Alfonsi's botched 2021 hit-piece claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with Publix, rewarding the grocery chain with exclusive access to COVID-19 vaccines as payback for political donations.
The report was a farce, in the end condemned even by Florida Democrats. CBS never explained how it got the story so wrong, and Alfonsi has never bothered to explain why she falsely claimed DeSantis wouldn't answer her questions about the alleged scheme. In fact, footage of an exchange between her and the governor himself showed that he had addressed the claims directly. But his response was not included — which may sound familiar.
CBS never corrected or apologized for that 2021 segment, instead issuing only a weak statement defending Alfonsi and the decision to omit DeSantis's response. Additional exculpatory facts and statements about Florida's vaccine program were also left out of CBS's report, including on-the-record statements by state Democrats.
In short, we have a news program run by journalists whose lack of professionalism does not end with their aversion to being told what to do by superiors.
This keeps happening — this may in fact be the third or fourth news cycle about something supposedly horrible happening at "60 Minutes." Again and again, we are told to drop everything and take a supposed assault on the free press very seriously. But it's hard to sympathize when the threat of imposing routine editorial standards is framed as the biggest threat to freedom of the press since Abe Lincoln imprisoned dissenting editors and closed their newsrooms.
Ignore all the big headlines about the First Amendment, the billionaire class buying media, the loss of journalistic independence, and so on. Ignore Dan Rather's claim that 60 Minutes is slipping into an "increasingly irretrievable and dark place." This Weiss-CECOT business is nothing more than a workplace dispute involving oversensitive and self-important activists. Because if there is one rule that modern journalists love to break, it's the one about making the story about themselves.
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.
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If Sharyn Alfonsi wants to be a social media podcaster who is free from editorial standards then grant her wish. Let's see how far Alfonsi would get without the institutional credentials she hides behind.
Low talent activism is not journalism. Sharyn Alfonsi proves that.
So, just so I have this straight, the piece wasn't aired because the EDITOR felt it was incomplete, and some left leaning bumble head leaked parts to create a false story of "censorship by the government" and the left blindly ran with it.
"News program"? "Journalists"? They've lowered themselves to the level of basement dwelling bloggers / vloggers spouting unfounded opinion pitching a hissy fit.