Specifically, Pelley finally details the bias and falsehoods that he said Weiss had tried to inject into his story. The story in question was one with a pretty quick turnaround during ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis this past winter, which included the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. “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,” says Pelley. “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 … it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this.”
Weiss disagreed. “[A]bout four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer,” says Pelley. As he points out, the videos of Good’s death do not show her driving toward the officer, but that’s how the president framed it online and how Weiss wanted it framed on 60 Minutes.
Pelley ultimately refused to make the (inaccurate) changes and said no one ever followed up with him. “It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made,” he says, which, well, you just have to laugh. Still, Pelley says her meddling nearly prevented the entire episode from airing. “That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air,” he says. “It was the night of the Grammys. “60 Minutes” was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast.”
Still, Pelley seems a little hesitant to attribute Weiss’ intentions to malice, calling her a “lovely person” and saying what she built with The Free Press “very successful.” “But television’s not her thing,” he says later. “This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'”
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