This is per Status (via the New York Post), which obtained a recording of remarks she made at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo in New Orleans on Thursday. While she admitted she was “scared to be talking publicly” about her exit from the show—an exit she says she’s still not been given an official reason for—she felt that the details were important to share.
According to Vega, the “new administration at CBS News” tried to meddle with at least three specific stories. The first related to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, where Vega says her team was asked to include footage of protestors attacking people they believed to be plain-clothes ICE agents; her team found “no credible examples” of such a thing. (This bears some similarities with an exchange Scott Pelley, who was also fired from the show, shared last month.) In the same story, she and her team were also asked to include an exchange between Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey and the city’s police chief, wherein Frey purportedly told the chief that the police officers should fight the ICE agents in the street, causing the chief to roll his eyes. “That never happened,” said Vega, calling it “misinformation.” “We could not find any instance of the mayor saying something like that.”
Another incident came about three weeks into the current war with Iran, in which Vega says journalists were instructed to open the piece with the line: “Who is winning the war? Iran is totally outgunned by the United States and Israel.” Vega called this an “administration talking point.” Then there was a story about SNAP food benefits related to impoverished communities in West Virginia. The goal was to tell the story “through the voices of strictly residents,” but CBS brass suggested bringing J.D. Vance into the story to discuss Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016 and takes place mostly in Ohio.
“If you watch my pieces, you’d see those examples did not make [it] in,” Vega said to applause. She says later, “I still have not been given a reason” for why she was fired, though she notes that she got the sense that the leadership at the Bari Weiss-led organization “were not liking this back and forth.” Still, Vega says that she never met with Weiss individually.
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