In what will hopefully be the first of many welcome changes at CBS News in this Bari Weiss era, senior vice president for standards and practices Claudia Milne announced Thursday she would be leaving the company after having played leading roles in what our friends at the New York Post noted were “some of the network’s recent controversial, woke reporting” in recent years.
For reference, the Post’s indefatigable media reporter Alexandra Steigrad explained the standards and practices unit at news organizations are “responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming,” so her departure marked the “the first senior executive to leave the network since Weiss” was named editor-in-chief on October 6.
Steigard, as always, came armed with sources. She found one who said Milne “was part of the woke mob at CBS News” and thus “Bari’s first scalp” as she seeks to move CBS back towards the center.
Steigard reminded readers of Milne’s past controversies, most notably her order in 2023 that CBS News journalists were not to make “any mention” of the fact that the Covenant Christian School shooter in Nashville, Tennessee was transgender.
We noted at the time that this was proof they would rather kowtow to the style guide mob at the far-left GLAAD than the facts from law enforcement.
Steigrad did make more news later in the piece by revealing another act of wokeness from Milne was her alleged decision to have helped prevent “former CBS News correspondent Catherine Herridge from interviewing Musk in 2023.”
“Herridge said on X that she’d had the rare opportunity to interview Musk after his high-profile purchase of the social media platform...But the interview opportunity landed with a thud, Herridge recounted on X, because Musk wanted to do it live. CBS execs said they would rather pass...than hold it live because they were worried about what Musk was going to say,” she added.
And in the third exhibit of Milne’s far-left attitude, Steigrad said she “played a part was last year’s criticism of ‘CBS Mornings’ co-host Tony Dokoupil after he grilled author Ta-Nehisi Coates over his one-sided polemic against Israel, which the writer compared to an ‘apartheid’ state.”
Ah, so she was part of the woke mob that demanded a struggle session against Dokoupil for the crime of asking Coates why he seemed to be ignorant of history and, to be blunt, have a problem with Jews.
On all three counts, Milne sounds like someone unfit to be part of any push to move CBS back toward a place of higher ratings, higher quality journalism, and higher levels of public trust.
