Status founder Oliver Darcy and his cadre of petulant children masquerading as anonymous CBS News staffers have found something else to complain about vis-à-vis editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her top lieutenants, leading to more threats of quitting by longtime correspondents (with it this time being Lesley Stahl and Holly Williams).
In his newsletter both on Monday and Tuesday, Darcy revealed CBS News correspondents and producers are seething over executive pushback to Stahl’s item on Sunday’s 60 Minutes heralding Palestinians in the West Bank and Williams’s October 7 CBS Mornings report from Israel on the third anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks.
Great minds think alike because, in both cases, NewsBusters pushed back on the Stahl and Williams reports.
At this point, CBS News has long since replaced Fox News as the chief object of not only Darcy’s ire, but the entire liberal, elitist media reporting establishment.
Going first to the Stahl kerfuffle, Darcy fawned over the piece about Palestinian resistance to Israeli settlers in the West Bank as “riveting” and “powerful” work by the “legendary” Stahl. Darcy said the piece “caught some observers by surprise, given the stridently pro-Israel positions of” both Weiss and her boss, Skydance CEO David Ellison.
We were also surprised, but Darcy’s anonymous sources let him know it was warranted.
Darcy insisted the initial reviews were uneventful, but it changed when “Weiss and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, entered the picture,” which his sources whined were “very, very hands on” and, in Darcy’s phrasing, “not confined to a particular factual assertion or isolated element of the report.”
This, Darcy huffed, “spiraled into a highly contentious editorial process,” with Forelle arguing the story should be delayed until a future date. Predictably, “Stahl strongly objected,” and matters “devolved into heated confrontations” that spilled into the weekend.
Of course, though, Stahl won out, but Darcy said she still “privately floated the possibility of quitting[.]”
Darcy kvetched this showed Weiss remains “determined to test just how far she can push the remaining stars of the storied newsmagazine” and these “repeated interventions in the editorial process have frustrated the program’s correspondents.”
It’s amazing what happens to these elitists when they’re introduced to a perspective from outside their bubbles.
The Williams story came with more fireworks. Darcy shared on Monday and Tuesday the concerns – which we at NewsBusters shared – from Weiss’s hand-picked foreign editor Shayndi Raice about how the senior foreign correspondent framed the anniversary of October 7 by seeming to give equal weight to Hamas’s terror and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza.
Specifically, Raice took issue with Williams’s emphasis on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll as fact, without any qualifiers (such as, for example, the fact that they do not distinguish between civilians and fighters).
As we’ll see, Raice called it a “magic number” and parroting it offensive “posturing” on a day that’s supposed to be focused on the victims of October 7.
It would be like CBS’s morning show using the third anniversary of 9/11 to give equal weight to those killed that day and the supposed toll of being Muslim in America.
They resulted in noticeable changes for her CBS Evening News item (click “expand”):
[L]ast week, CBS News marked the anniversary of the horrific October 7 terror attack with reports from foreign correspondent Holly Williams. Her morning piece prominently addressed the devastation that Israel’s ensuing war had inflicted on Gaza, with Gayle King introducing it by mentioning the staggering death toll. That report, which was critical of Israel, appeared to make it onto the air without incident.
But something peculiar happened later in the day.
Williams was working on a separate report for the “CBS Evening News” and planned to include the death toll from the war in Gaza. That would have provided viewers with important context about the consequences of the conflict that followed the October 7 attack. But Status has learned that Williams received pushback when CBS News brass saw it in her script.
The pushback, Status has learned, was delivered by Weiss’ handpicked foreign editor, Shayndi Raice…[T]here were discussions about how to potentially note the tens of thousands who have been killed in the wake of the October 7 attack, but ultimately the context was omitted from the “Evening News” piece.
Indeed, Williams’ report aired without mentioning the nearly 75,000 people, many of them children, who have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
“I’m told Williams was frustrated by the intervention…I’m told the matter has prompted her to seriously weigh her long-term future,” he added.
The anti-Weiss vipers had another trick up their sleeves. On Tuesday afternoon, Darcy released a recap of audio from a meeting of the CBS foreign bureau hours earlier in which Raice gave a reality check.
Darcy called it “an uninterrupted 15-minute tirade” and “extraordinary lecture” delivered “[w]ith a particularly condescending tone.”
Raice dropped the hammer, even as Darcy insisted it was “a straw man” for Raice to say CBS reporters are “resistant to having their work scrutinized by network brass and instead” demand “freedom…without any editorial oversight.”
The fact this meeting leaked was proof that Raice’s statements were not a straw man (click “expand”):
“I am not here to be a logistician,” Raice said. “I am not here to get you from one place to the other. That’s not why I was hired. And honestly, it’s not what I want to be doing. What I’m here to do is discuss stories, to give my insights into stories, to help you and push you to be better.”
Raice then proceeded to build up a straw man, suggesting that the journalists under her supervision were resistant to having their work scrutinized by network brass and instead wanted the freedom to publish their reporting without any editorial oversight.
“This idea that somebody … comes up with a story idea, writes a script, and nobody above them is allowed to have any comment on it—that’s not journalism,” Raice said. “I’m sorry, journalism is a process where you are challenged, you are pushed to dig deeper, to do more, to try harder—not just to be fair, but to be smarter.”
(….)
“I have experience, I have knowledge, I have editing talent, and I have editorial judgment that I can bring to the table,” Raice said, touting her credentials. “And you will get a lot out of your job if you work with me and collaborate with me, hear my opinions, take my feedback, let me push you because I’m not pushing you for any other reason than I want the journalism to be the absolute best it can be. I want it to be the smartest. I want it to be the sharpest. And I don’t want excuses.”
“I don’t want to hear that I am interfering editorially when I give comments on a script, or when I give you feedback on a story, or when I say I don’t want us to focus on that angle,” Raice added.
One has to wonder if this was the first time these liberals were told by someone within the house they’re not deities.
Raice also eviscerated Williams’s CBS Mornings report and its tone-deafness (click “expand”):
“If you think that deciding on October 7 that the way to open up an anniversary story about the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust is to show a montage of Israeli bombs falling on countries in the Middle East, you have an opinion,” Raice said, appearing to directly reference Williams’ morning report. “You have decided—and I’m not saying it’s not valid—that the story of October 7 is a story about Israeli aggression, Israeli violence, Israel, you know, overresponding, overreacting. Is that a valid opinion? Yes, it is. And if you wanted to do a story like that, I didn’t actually have a problem with that story. I think it’s fine.”
Raice continued: “What I have a problem with is saying that if somebody else says, ‘No, you know what? I actually think on the October 7 anniversary we should focus instead on what happened that day to the people who were killed, and we can do other stories about Gaza, and we can shine a light on everything that’s happened to Palestinians since then, but in our main TV piece, we’re going to focus on the victims of that day.’ Another valid opinion. OK, these are two ways of doing it, and don’t think that because you chose the first way it means you’re more objective than the person who chose the other way, OK? You’re not. You have an opinion too.”
She concluded by again popping the bubbles of their egos:
“This is not your publishing platform,” Raice said. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place. And at the end of the day, you have to answer to that hierarchy. If you can’t answer to that hierarchy, and you don’t listen to what we say, that is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
After Williams insisted everyone is open to feedback, Raice responded with another takedown of the anti-Israel virus (click “expand”):
“We’re not saving Palestinians by saying, by repeating this magic number, like that’s not, you know—and that’s what I mean by also like the posturing. It’s just these are hard decisions that people see differently on, and we have to debate it, and you know, we come up with the best way we think.”
(….)
“I was just in Israel for Sukkot. I have a lot of friends who live there. We’re talking about politics the entire time. Everybody was talking about the election. Everybody was talking about Netanyahu and October 7. Nobody was talking about those allegations,” Raice added. “And you know why? Because nobody really cares. That is not an issue in the election.”
“Those allegations are a sideshow,” Raice added. “It’s not important, and I just think you got it wrong. And you probably got it wrong because you don’t know the story as well as I do. And that’s where my experience and my judgment comes in.”
