Phil Napoli Professor at Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy
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Transcript
22 segmentsSixty minutes was in the news last night, but not for the obvious reasons. Instead, it turned out that a report that was supposed to air last night was shelved at the last minute. It was a segment featuring the accounts of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador. Now one of its own correspondence fears the program is being dismantled. Some employees, according to CNN, are threatening to quit. Phil Napoli is a professor at Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy and joins us now. Phil, how are you? I'm good, thanks. So this was a move made apparently on Saturday by Bari Weiss, who is now the CBS News editor-in-chief, the reporter who put together the report and figured it was a done deal, according to its timeline released today by CNN. She went home to Texas on Friday. She believes now that this is purely political. And I guess this was the concern that many had when Bari Weiss wound up assuming command at CBS News earlier this year. Right, right. And my understanding is it was reviewed five times and given the green light to air, and that Bari Weiss opted to hold it because it didn't include an official statement from the White House, you know, raises a question about whether it's political or not, because you can imagine if all reporting about political matters waited until an official statement was released from whatever government agency, White House, et cetera, becomes a de facto, you know, way of spiking any story. Exactly. And this coming from Bari Weiss has an incredible amount of irony because she started something called the Free Press. And she built her platform after she left the New York Times on being a free speech advocate. Now she won't run report unless the White House has something to say about it. Seems to fly in the face of what she was about. Yeah, it does. And, you know, the free press. really wasn't, you know, journalistic in the, in the most rigorous sense to begin with. It was really an opinion outlet, and that was another one of the concerns here when she moved to this position was that this is somebody whose expertise and experiences in opinion and not really in, you know, robust journalism and the practices and norms around that. At her heart, Bari Weiss is not a journalist. And I think that's one thing that I find so interesting about her rise at CBS here. And I guess that is going to be one of the things that's very interesting about this as it goes forward here is she's basically ordering a group of journalists when she was never one herself. Is that seems just a natural recipe for conflict? Absolutely. And it's sort of indicative of the larger...
problem we've been facing in journalism over the past decade and a half or so, maybe even longer, which is, you know, the boundaries around who is and who is not a journalist and what is and what is not journalism have been allowed to get very fuzzy for a variety of reasons. And I think it would be wonderful if the pendulum started to swing back the other way and we were a little more stringent about what we call journalism. As for the piece itself, it was reviewed according to various reports five times by attorneys, by standards and practices at CBS. Armacantan, who has submitted several many pieces, in fact, for CBS News over the years, tweeted out today that he had lots of investigative pieces over 60 across eight years. They were... screened in his words three times, that's the average rate. So it's not like that this wasn't run through the coals over and over again. This was something that was examined very thoroughly. Yeah, and again, it's interesting that all, we know all this this soon, right? You know, we know this because the folks involved are willing to share how this process has worked. And, you know, one can only hope that this sort of scrutiny, you know. it becomes useful to them as they maybe rethink their process is going forward. Yeah. Now I just wonder how CBS News is, what is the future of it, it's going to look like here? I mean, is it going to be something that is subject to veto power from the Trump administration? In that case, it's not going to be a journalistic news outlet. Right. And obviously, this is a case where You know, there's a huge amount of tradition here. There's a huge amount of brand equity. And that's probably what makes it particularly appealing to try to recast in a different way. Because for some folks... the shift might not be perceptible, and it could be very influential for that very reason. Yeah. I wonder how perceptible it could be. I mean, the reporter last night who wound up going public with this did not waste any times, and it was clear based on the timeline that came out today that she was blindsided by what happened because the call was apparently made by Bari Weiss on Saturday. It'll be interesting to, I mean, there were reports, Brian Stelter reported CNN last night that there are those threatening to Quinn, and I guess that will be the most clear way that this could become perceptible. Absolutely right, and then, of course... Who replaces them? And the folks who replace the folks who quit could be very much in line with Bari Weiss's M.O. going forward. There were people last night drawing the comparison between the Jeffrey Wigan situation, which was depicted in the movie with Al Pacino and Russell Crow, the informer that came out in 1999. I guess the difference here is that wasn't political by nature, and this is.
Right. My reckless right, that involved the tobacco industry. And, you know, where, you know, the economics and the political could obviously intertwine, you know, overlap a bit, certainly. Yeah. Do you expect, Bari Weiss has taken a lot of heat for this here. Do you expect her tenure in a traditional media outlet to be a long one? Oh, that's a great question. Obviously, this has generated a lot of publicity, whether her boss's approve or disapprove of this approach to running CBS news is a whole other question. She might be doing exactly what she was brought in there to do. We have to, you know, acknowledge that. Exactly. And the piece that she did last week with Charlie Kirk's widow, actually two weeks ago now, that was clearly set up for a new flavor, but advertisers didn't seem to open their arms to it. Neither did. It didn't do great ratings. Then again, I'm not sure what can do great ratings nowadays on network television aside from sports. So we'll see how, I guess it remains to be seeing how far she, how much leeway she gets. Right, and as with everything, as we saw with the Jimmy Kimmel issues, you know, money will talk here. If her approach to running CBS means advertisers go away and ratings drop. That might test their commitment to this new approach. Exactly. And there has been online a potential talk of a boycott of Paramount Paramount Plus app. We'll see how far that gained. Certainly ABC felt the heat earlier this year with the Jimmy Kimmel situation. That led to a major... major loss of money, and we saw how that wound up. Phil Napoli from the Duke University Sanford School Public Policy. Thank you so much for joining us here today. Have a wonderful holiday, and we'll talk again in 2026. Take care. Thanks.