Tensions are building at CBS News as “60 Minutes” correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley face potential firing for resisting editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s changes. Weiss, who was appointed after Paramount Skydance acquired the Free Press, oversees the program and pushed back on Alfonsi’s CECOT prison segment for lacking balance, delaying its release.
Apparently, Alfonsi reportedly yelled “You don’t get to produce me!” at deputy Adam Rubenstein and accused him of being a Trump mouthpiece. Others, such as Pelley, criticized Weiss publicly and internally. Staff resist Weiss’s qualifications and views, comparing the clash to “Game of Thrones.”
“It’s going to be a war,” an anonymous network insider told the media. “They don’t think their s–t stinks. CBS News is allergic to changes, especially ‘60 Minutes’ people.” The same source declared, “They don’t think Bari Weiss is qualified to be their boss.”
Apparently, during the fight, Sharyn Alfonsi yelled at Adam Rubenstein, “You don’t get to produce me!” The entitled reporter also accused Rubenstein of being “a mouthpiece” for the Trump administration and questioned his experience. As part of the discussion, Rubenstein responded that he had produced TV journalism and told her to calm down.
“Everyone at CBS News knows there will be a boss every two years,” said an internal source. “She’s becoming a headache and Ellison doesn’t need a headache. They will do the bare minimum in appeasing Bari Weiss in the hopes she flames out.” However, another anonymous insider quipped, “Everybody has a boss and they need to realize that Bari Weiss is theirs.”
Speaking about the situation, President Trump reacted, “I see good things happening in the news. I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership—CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
“Fox News and MSNBC were feeding their audiences ‘political heroin,'” Bari Weiss noted, “I think there’s a lot of people in this country who are politically homeless, who feel like the old labels—Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal—no longer fit them or no longer mean what they used to.”
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Offering a cynical view, an industry insider alleged, “They just wanted to hire Bari as a symbolic gesture to Donald Trump to make sure they got that deal through. Don’t think about it as David Ellison paying a hundred and fifty million dollars for The Free Press. Think about it as a hundred and fifty million dollars on top of the price they paid for Paramount. It was basically the cost to get it to go through.”
Another liberal claimed, “Bari had no idea how newsrooms worked, but she knew that she needed to call our operation a newsroom. I don’t think if you sat her down and said, ‘Can you explain the difference between a news story, an investigative story, and an enterprise story?,’ she could tell you what it means—and she wasn’t going to let that slow her down.”
Describing her vision for the new outlet, Weiss said that she “holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.”