Bari Weiss demanded that 60 Minutes lie about Renee Good to whitewash her murder

Scott Pelley is leaving no boats unburned [gift link]:

You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. 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.

So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. 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, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

One of the keys to understanding Bari Weiss is that she published a truly embarrassing apologia for Derek Chauvin, had it thoroughly and dispositively debunked by an actual journalist, and responded not with a correction but with a “debate him bro.” If the truth conflicts with critical MAGA narratives, there’s no question what she’s going to go with.

Turning 60 Minutes into pro-Trump slop is exactly what she was hired to do, of course, but CBS seems to think that it was possible to do this without killing their most valuable news brand and are finding out the hard way:

Over the last week, as Bari Weiss plunged CBS News into an unprecedented crisis by implementing her ill-advised overhaul of “60 Minutes,” other Paramount leaders have been left to deal with the fallout. Indeed, Status has learned that the Weiss-induced turmoil at the David Ellison-owned network is now creating headaches beyond CBS News.

According to people familiar with the matter, CBS Entertainment chief Amy Reisenbach has privately told associates that creatives in Hollywood have expressed disdain over Weiss’ efforts to remake the network.

But that’s not all. I’m told Reisenbach has made clear in such conversations that she too believes Weiss is inflicting significant damage on the broader CBS brand—creating problems for other company leaders, including herself.

As one example, Reisenbach has said that showrunners have approached her in a panic. Citing new “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Nick Bilton’s comments equating linear television to a rapidly melting ice cube, they’ve questioned why they should continue developing broadcast programs for the network. Others in Hollywood, she has said, have voiced concern over Weiss pushing CBS in what they perceive to be a more MAGA-friendly direction.

Reisenbach is hardly alone in that assessment. Dozens of others, including senior figures inside Ellison’s Paramount, share the view that Weiss is damaging the company brand, I’m told. In fact, some believe she should be relieved of her duties.

A company spokesperson declined to comment.

Reisenbach’s remarkably candid assessment in private comes as CBS News tries to put out a five-alarm fire that threatens the very existence of “60 Minutes,” the crown jewel of broadcast journalism. After Weiss fired the storied newsmagazine’s senior leadership team, as well as correspondents Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Sharyn Alfonsi, other senior figures inside the show have weighed whether to leave.

The modest success of Weiss’s group blog seems to have convinced both herself and the Ellisons that you can do it at scale to a much larger and different audience, but you can’t.