Late last week, a new wrinkle emerged in the CBS News layoffs. Reports revealed South Africa-based foreign correspondent Debora Patta – whose anti-Israel tilt made her an ill fit with the network’s new vision under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss – may sue the network after supposedly having not been on the list of layoffs but made it to the final list in place of Rome-based foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, who lobbied Weiss to keep his job.
The New York Post’s Ariel Zilber and Alexandra Steigrad reported Friday morning that “Weiss intervened to save the job of a foreign correspondent after he complained of being sidelined because of his strong support for Israel — opting to fire a reporter who’d irked US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, instead[.]”
We covered this August incident in real time, with Huckabee having sat down with Patta and being repeatedly lectured about Israel and accused of supporting forced hunger in Gaza.
They continued, later adding The Independent was the first to report on the Livesay-for-Patta switch: “The move came after Rome-based correspondent Chris Livesay appealed directly to Weiss, complaining of his mistreatment and asking to be assigned as Israel correspondent, sources told The Post on Friday.”
Explaining “Patta is now looking into legal action” because she had been previously “told she was safe from the cuts.”
As for the Huckabee sitdown, Ambassador Huckabee’s team was so irked by the hostile interview his team “posted the full transcript on the US embassy’s website, showing that CBS cut portions in which he questioned the authenticity of widely circulated photos of malnourished children and argued that some images were misattributed or staged.”
And, as for the layoffs of CBS Saturday Morning co-hosts Dana Jacobson and Michelle Miller, they did indeed host this past Saturday and told they would still be around “for a few more weeks.”
Separately at the Post, they highlighted a social media meltdown from a producer who was laid off from his posts at CBS Evening News Plus as well as the far-left Race and Culture Unit, which represented the epitome of the woke, race-obsessed virus that’s come to infect American culture and journalism.
Without a shred of evidence, the producer claimed every single layoff in his team “was a person of color” and their replacements would be exclusively white people.
Good on CBS and Bari Weiss for ensuring such virulent hate was kicked to the curb.
