{"id":237,"date":"2026-06-08T18:11:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=237"},"modified":"2026-06-08T18:11:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:11:46","slug":"fire-bari-weiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=237","title":{"rendered":"Fire Bari Weiss!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

After CBS News 60 Minutes<\/em> correspondent Scott Pelley was fired by Bari Weiss\u2019s incompetent henchman Nick Bilton last week, the network veteran went public with his complaints about Weiss\u2019s politically motivated mismanagement of the show. One of his most noteworthy complaints was that she pushed the correspondents to add distortions and lies to some of their segments. Media critics asked that Pelley be more specific, and on Sunday, with The New York Times<\/em>, he was.<\/p>\n

Read more Marjane Satrapi\u2019s Rebellious Art<\/a><\/p>\n

Most outrageously, he told Lulu Garcia-Navarro that for a February segment on the ICE siege of Minneapolis, four hours after the show\u2019s final deadline, Weiss asked him to make the protesters look more violent, and add that the martyr Ren\u00e9e Good, mother and poet, was driving toward her murderer (even though multiple forensic video examinations, including by CBS, concluded that she had already turned the car away from him when he shot her in the head). Pelley refused, and the segment ran as it had been produced. He never heard back from Weiss about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a thumb on the scale for the president\u2019s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m as big a fan of Pelley\u2019s bravery in confronting Weiss and Bilton as any journalist with integrity, but I have to point out, with respect, that Pelley had already bent over backward to present \u201cboth sides\u201d of ICE\u2019s deadly siege of the city. In the interview with Garcia-Navarro, he exaggerated the violence of the protesters, saying they accounted for \u201chalf\u201d of the \u201cconfrontations\u201d that rocked Operation Metro Surge:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019d 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\u2026. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

OK, a snowball, a chest-bump, and a kicked out police-car taillight. And some screaming. Compared with two murders, at least one other shooting, an innocent disabled woman violently pulled from her car, an elderly Hmong man wrested from his house in his underwear in the brutal Minneapolis cold, protesters tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos kidnapped from school and taken to Texas as immigration authorities tried to deport his father\u2026 I just did that from memory. Oh, and a whole lot of screaming and swearing by ICE and CBP officers. \u201cFuckin\u2019 bitch,\u201d which is what Jonathan Ross said after murdering Ren\u00e9e Good, is just one example.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t want to be too hard on Pelley. He is a distinguished 37-year-veteran of a news organization steeped in notions of \u201cobjectivity\u201d and \u201cbalance\u201d that haven\u2019t really served the country since the Reagan years. This is his default. And especially in the Trump years, I think even some good journalists who want to resist falling victim to Trump\u2019s attacks, whether that\u2019s extorting $16 million out of ABC with a lawsuit the network would have won and the same amount from CBS for an even more bogus lawsuit, are looking over their shoulders more.<\/p>\n

Read more How Jared Kushner Sparked a Political Crisis in Albania<\/a><\/p>\n

Given all the surrendering we\u2019ve seen from top media executives and some journalists, Pelley\u2019s courage stands out. Just a week ago, he confronted Bilton to his face demanding an explanation for Weiss\u2019s decision to fire esteemed 60 Minutes<\/em> producer Tania Simon and veteran correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega a few days before. He called it \u201cBlack Thursday\u201d and said Weiss was \u201cmurdering\u201d the venerable television news magazine. <\/p>\n

\u201cShe has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job,\u201d Pelley told Bilton, and he asked why the former tech journalist had taken the job \u201cknowing that you will never be welcome here.\u201d Bilton shot back, \u201cI am not intimidated,\u201d but he left the meeting after only 15 minutes, telling staff, \u201cEnjoy the bagels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss charged Pelley with creating a \u201chostile work environment,\u201d and Bilton fired him a day later, \u201cfor cause,\u201d which means he got no severance. (That\u2019s gonna be a fun lawsuit for Pelley\u2019s attorneys.)<\/p>\n

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro why he confronted Bilton publicly:<\/p>\n

\n

There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant<\/em>. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don\u2019t know that, have never felt that, and don\u2019t understand it, is a tragedy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A week before the blowup with Bilton, Pelley showed courage by standing alongside a student journalist, Santiago Campos, who won a $10,000 scholarship in the name of venerated 60 Minutes<\/em> correspondent Mike Wallace. Campos thanked CBS, but said he had to \u201cacknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.\u201d Pelley put his arm around the young man after his speech. \u201cWe look forward to seeing your work in the future,\u201d he said. \u201cGod, we need young people like you right behind us. I know that Mike Wallace is looking down at you with pride at this very moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: The Politicization of the IRS<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nFire Bari Weiss! - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=237\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fire Bari Weiss! - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=237\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-08T18:11:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Fire Bari Weiss!\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-08T18:11:46+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237\"},\"wordCount\":1034,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/5c3ab40b8fb26f6c5e7a33458fc30ed7.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=237\",\"name\":\"Fire Bari Weiss! 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