Since Bari Weiss came to lead CBS News, she’s ushered in a new era of doing “the fucking news.” Her first order of business included republishing her newsletter’s questionable reporting on how four NYPD officers are scared of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral prospects. (They also misspelled Mamdani’s name in the headline and left it up for several days.) Before getting around to Weiss’ usual bugaboos (trans people, Palestinians, “woke,” etc.), CBS News’ standards and practices chief is heading for the door, making Claudia Milne, who’s been overseeing the department since 2021, the first senior exec to exit.
Per Variety, Milne announced her resignation to colleagues in a memo. Milne leaves as CBS adds the FCC-required conservative ombudsman, a former Trump adviser, who will take a closer look at the so-called liberal biases of CBS News. In her resignation letter, Milnes admits that the U.S. and CBS “live in complicated times” and that it’s a journalist’s job “to hold the powerful to account.” Unlike her former new boss, Milne had experience in television news, having spent most of her career at the BBC. Before arriving at CBS in 2019, she also worked at ProPublica and Bloomberg TV.
“We are here to question and challenge our political leaders on behalf of our audiences, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative,” Milne writes. “We must interrogate the social media companies that want to control our attention, the businesses that manage our healthcare and the institutions that shape our education system.”
Milne encourages those staying with CBS to keep “asking those tough questions, challenge those in authority and keep informing the audience.” Even without her, she believes that CBS “will continue to do it in the fair, balanced and unbiased way that this organization always has and is the bedrock of good journalism.” Variety reports that former CBS News president Susan Zirinsky and former CBS News senior producer and standards executive Al Ortiz will oversee standards and practices until a new lead is in place.
