Last December, newly installed CBS News chief Bari Weiss took her first opportunity to show how much she actually cares about press freedom, and boy, did she deliver. The founder of The Free Press spiked a story by Sharyn Alfonsi about the Salvadoran prisons that the U.S. government was sending those detained by ICE to until the president could weigh in. When he didn’t, she held the story for a month and then quietly released it without much fanfare. Six months later, CBS allowed Alfonsi’s contract to expire, per The New York Times. In an email to her colleagues, Alfonsi wrote that despite her best efforts to reconcile with CBS, she was met with silence. “It was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting.” The crusaders of free speech strike again!
“The message could be clearer: my time at 60 Minutes is apparently over,” Alfonsi wrote. “In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like ‘modernization’ and ‘restructuring’ to explain away my departure. Don’t be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.” Some of those modernization ideas, according to the Times, include shorter digital segments and live events, recycling some of her ideas for The Free Press.
Alfonsi continues to warn her ex-co-workers that the separation between newsroom independence and corporate interests are “being methodically torn down,” and journalists willing to challenge Weiss’ commitment to protecting the powerful are being “pushed aside” for those who don’t. Alfonsi concludes: “If this continues, the result will be a broadcast that looks like 60 Minutes but lacks the courage and character to produce journalism that matters.” To that end, 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon might be next on the chopping block—though Weiss reportedly might bringing in an outsider to oversee Simon’s work.
Alfonsi had been expecting this outcome. Upon receiving the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C, earlier this month, she said in her acceptance speech, “I was doing my job, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Fear is a funny thing – it can paralyze you, or it can point you to exactly what needs to be protected. Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things. We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence. There is a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.”
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