Good day all. When Skydance and the Ellisons bought Paramount, they also acquired CBS and the CBS News division. I’ve commented on how unhappy the Libtards in the CBS News division were when the sale was announced and then Bari Weiss put in charge of the division. It was so bad that a flat out mutiny took place.
None of this stopped the Weiss and the Ellisons. It has slowed them down a bit. They were able to get rid of a number of people. They either quit in a huff, were bought out, or in a few cases, fired. However, a lot of the big names were still in place and being obstinate. People asked why they weren’t simply fired. The reason I assumed was contracts.
It’s tough to fire someone under a contract. Doing so can cost a lot of money. Instead, it looks like the new management decided to just not renew the contracts of people they wanted to get rid of. It looks like one of these people is Sharyn Alfonsi. Here are the details from Fox News:
“60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi announced Wednesday that CBS News declined to renew her contract months after she lashed out at editor-in-chief Bari Weiss for delaying a segment about allegations of abuses at the El Salvador prison CECOT.
I recall that incident. Ms. Weiss reviewed the story and found it to be not very well done. It was one sided and amounted to little more than leftist propaganda. Bari Weiss basically told them to get both sides of the issue and not just the Progressive handouts from the Democrat Party. Alfonsi went off the deep end.
Liberal critics of Weiss and Paramount CEO David Ellison have accused them of bending the knee to President Donald Trump and trying to curry favor with his administration. Alfonsi, a longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” insisted late last year that the decision by Weiss to hold the story, “Inside CECOT,” was done for political rather than editorial reasons.
A number of people, including myself, wondered why Alfonsi wasn’t simply escorted from the building. It may have been her contract was written in such a way as to make it all but impossible to fire her. So they just waited her contract out.
Six months later, Alfonsi said her agent’s attempts to negotiate were ignored by CBS honchos and blasted the network for “abandoning” its mission to prioritize independent reporting.
“Over the weekend, my contract with CBS News expired, drawing to a close nearly twenty years with the network, including more than a decade at ‘60 Minutes,’” Alfonsi told Fox News Digital.
I have no idea why she was so surprised that her agent’s calls to CBS went straight to voicemail. Alfonsi’s days were numbered when she blasted Bari Weiss and the Ellisons.
“Following an intense editorial dispute over our CECOT story, repeated attempts by my representation to establish a path forward were met with absolute silence from network executives. The message could not be clearer: my time at ‘60 Minutes’ is apparently over,” she continued. “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.”
That would be the polite terms certain corporate types would use. If it were me, I would simply say that Sharyn Alfonsi’s actions were detrimental to the CBS News Institution and that her contract would not be renewed, and that we wish her luck on her future endeavors with the Iranian News Service or in the fast food industry.
Alfonsi, who is technically still employed by CBS News, said that it was “not a routine corporate transition,” and instead a “deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
That’s just it. The story wasn’t “Factually accurate.” It was a flat out hit piece.
“Fearless, independent reporting has always been the defining standard at ‘60 Minutes.’ Today, CBS management is abandoning that mission, choosing access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it,” she said.
And this is another reason that CBS News and Skydance/Paramount have decided to get rid of her. She has forgotten that she is NOT the one in charge. That has been the problem with CBS News for years. They, like most of the legacy media, long ago ceased even pretending to be neutral reporters of information. They became nothing more than a propaganda service for the Democrat Party.
“The wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down. Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not,” Alfonsi added. “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.”
In a stunning note to fellow “60 Minutes” staffers that quickly leaked to the media, Alfonsi said her segment was being held for political reasons, not editorial ones. Alfonsi told colleagues Weiss had “spiked” the story and not given her a chance to discuss it further.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
That wasn’t the point. The story may have been technically accurate, but was not complete. That was why Weiss delayed it.
She added that “60 Minutes” made requests for comment to the White House, Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department. Their silence was their statement, she wrote, and allowing that to delay the story was effectively giving them veto power.
That “They didn’t respond to us” excuse? It turned out to be a flat out lie. The Administration did respond. Alfonsi ignored the response.
“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” she wrote.
As I recall, it wasn’t that the Administration wasn’t going to respond, they never got the messages in the first place or they tried to respond and were ignored. That led to an announcement that the News Division was going to be reorganized. Well, it looks like one of the first people to be “Reorganized” is Sharyn Alfonsi. If she didn’t see this coming after her ranting and raving, she is to dumb to be in the news gathering manufacturing business.
Just a small update here. I wrote this before Scott Pelley was fired. I just hadn’t gotten around to posting it.
Thatisall
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