With new reporting Wednesday night about CBS News employees enraged by its compliance with the FCC demand for the full, unedited Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview and rumors of a settlement with President Trump, Puck’s Dylan Byers bolstered the argument the liberal media are filled to the brim with insecure partisans.
The subhead said it all: “Inside the agony and finger-pointing at CBS News, where executives and journalists are protesting Shari Redstone’s eagerness to settle Trump’s suit, countenancing their diminishing place in the firmament, and girding for the FCC to extract maximum political pain.”
Byers first griped that CBS took “the irregular step of acquiescing to a Federal Communications Commission request” before revealing 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens “was fervently trying to defend the network’s integrity” with “an all-hands meeting” Monday.
In it, he conceded the network would turn over its footage to the FCC, but declared he would “not apologize for anything” and their editing of Harris’s answers and correspondent Bill Whitaker’s questions was “perfectly fine.”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump-hating liberal network’s employees were aghast:
Owens’s remarks hardly calmed the waters at CBS, where employees are still quietly rebelling against owner Shari Redstone’s plan to settle the lawsuit that President Trump brought against the network over the interview. As I reported last week, Shari has privately determined that a low-eight figure gift to the Trump Presidential Library is a small price to pay to close her tortured $8 billion deal to sell the company to Skydance.
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In any event, Owens’s remarks triggered mixed emotions among the 60 Minutes anchors and correspondents in the room and, eventually, journalists across CBS News.
He added “everyone at the network....opposes the settlement and views it as a gross incursion on press freedom” before delivering the kicker about possible rage quitting, which host Scott Pelley and correspondent/CNN host Anderson Cooper allegedly stepped into beg staff not follow through:
Some in Monday’s meeting discussed issuing public statements or even resigning, though both Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper advised their colleagues against such dramatic steps. (Anderson candidly posited that, in today’s media landscape, there were few other places, if any, where they could go and produce similar work.) Some interpreted Owens’s remark as a dare to the parentco to fire him, which might then catalyze an actual rebellion.
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[I]n Monday’s meeting, Pelley told his colleagues that any public displays of protest would be moot, since Trump would almost certainly reframe the narrative to his benefit.
Byers did find someone at CBS News to anonymously pivot to blame Owens for, in Byers’s words, “leaving them vulnerable to this situation in the first place” given the interview’s profile and Harris’s performance in them writ large were a major campaign theme:
“Is the edit fine?” one CBS News insider asked rhetorically. “It’s obviously an unforced error.” Several sources said the discrepancy was preventable, and argued that Owens and 60 Minutes should have taken greater care to ensure consistency between the two interview clips,
The funniest part? Towards the end, Byers said CBS’s “internal protests” are nothing more than “bitch[ing] and moan[ing]” to other reporters and “a round of layoffs shortly” this hubbub included “Jen DePriest, one of the veteran lawyers responsible for—wait for it—reviewing transcripts in order to ensure the integrity of the broadcast.”
