The Left plays by different rules, and while I disagree with people who argue that we should adopt the same rules to fight them, that doesn’t mean that we should pretend that people who are not good-faith actors should be treated the same as those who are.
As Ed has written about in two posts, the controversy over Bari Weiss’s delay of a 60 Minutes story on Trump’s deportation of illegal aliens to El Salvador’s CECOT has completely gotten out of hand.
Not only was Weiss right about the story not being balanced, but now we know that the “journalists” who put together the story and leaked it to Canadian media actually lied to her and the world about the reporting that they did.
Elon is absolutely right. There is no point tinkering at the margins by debating wording, editing choices, or how a segment might be polished or improved. The problem is not execution. The entire 60 Minutes operation is corrupted, and it has been for a very long time, going back… https://t.co/jApBVI80Mk
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) December 24, 2025
Elon is absolutely right. There is no point tinkering at the margins by debating wording, editing choices, or how a segment might be polished or improved. The problem is not execution. The entire 60 Minutes operation is corrupted, and it has been for a very long time, going back at least to the Dan Rather fake letter episode, which was explicitly designed to take down George W. Bush.
That was followed by a long series of scandals, including 60 Minutes loudly insisting that Biden family corruption claims had been debunked, insisting that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not verified, and, more recently, deceptively stitching together Kamala Harris’s incoherent word salad into something that resembled a coherent answer. These are not the mistakes of a newsroom that occasionally gets something wrong. They are the consistent behaviors of a political propaganda operation.
Framing this as a debate about journalistic standards completely misses the point. These are political operatives, not reporters, and the only serious course of action is to shut the operation down and rebuild from scratch with entirely new people.
Everybody is pretending that this controversy is about journalistic standards and whether 60 Minutes did its work appropriately. There is a lot of talk about Standards and Practices, lawyers, vetting, and the like, as if crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is in a manner that might keep CBS on just the right side of the “slander” line were the point.
Some nuggets in here @axios:
– Can confirm WH, State Dept and DHS all provided on record comment in response to CBS News journalists’ request for comment ahead of the segment. None of those comments made airhttps://t.co/hFkRmt5Uv9— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) December 22, 2025
That’s not even close to the point, and neither is the claim that every statement in the story is factual (which turns out not to be the case, if that matters by now).
I can make factual statements about somebody that, for instance, pass the “factual” test without actually conveying truth. For instance, I could say that Dan Rather fondled his mother’s breasts regularly, and that would be factually correct, and without context would be a shocking assertion. If I added that he was an infant breastfeeding at the time, the truth of the matter would be revealed by the context. The first statement makes him sound like a pervert; the second makes him sound perfectly normal.
Sharyn Alfonsi’s producer for the botched DeSantis story (Oriana Zill de Granados) is also the producer for the CECOT story. https://t.co/BByr8wnMan
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) December 23, 2025
If a “journalist” only reports the “fact” without proper context, it’s clear that they are not using “journalistic” judgment to inform people of important information; they intend to slander somebody in the slyest way possible and get away with it.
That is the sort of thing that went on here, just as has gone on at 60 Minutes for years. By massaging words or facts in ways intended to manipulate the viewer, these “reporters” are acting as political propagandists, not journalists getting to the truth.
They are doing the same thing to discredit Bari Weiss, accusing her of giving Donald Trump a “kill switch” on their reporting.
Those of us who are interested in the truth—and I don’t mean by that “conservatives,” but rather all people who are interested in understanding reality and communicating its nature fairly and accurately—need to get past the idea that we must pretend that Pravda propaganda is just another type of journalism.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “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.”
Ms. Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
Propagandists aren’t journalists, and we should quit acting as if they can be negotiated with or persuaded. As you can see from the very fact that the “journalists” in question lied about whether the administration would comment on their story, and then leaked their drivel into the media after their Editor in Chief told them to do better, these people have an agenda. They want to “get” Trump and they want to evict Bari Weiss.
They should be fired, not coddled or negotiated with.
