Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS
"Notes from someone who's withstood White House demands to stop an explosive story—and who once even had a 60 Minutes piece spiked."
[Spencer Ackerman at Forever Wars]
Spencer Ackerman has had a 60 Minutes piece spiked and has withstood White House demands to stop a story. And he has some thoughts about Bari Weiss spiking the 60 Minutes story about CECOT.
“That's where my mind goes when I read about Weiss "delaying" the 60 Minutes CECOT piece. To what it would have meant for The Guardian leadership to cave on the Snowden stories. What it meant for the Times leadership to have self-censored its reporting on NSA bulk surveillance and CIA torture. The lesson to any journalist attempting to reveal the highest-stakes stories is that you must fight your outlet if you're going to do the work your audience needs to understand the situation it's in.”
Ackerman takes great pains to indicate that CBS was never the bastion of independent journalism that commentators with rose-tinted glasses might have suggested: it had a cozy relationship with the CIA and was indisputably an instrument of power. Still, what Bari Weiss is doing with it rises to some other level: a mouthpiece for right-wing talking points.
It’s also worth saying that this matters less and less. Broadcast news has been slowly diminishing for a generation. CBS, in other words, is not where most people are getting their news. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be again, if it transformed itself into an authentic, trustworthy voice that meets audiences where they’re at today. Which is the opposite of that’s happening; and regardless, it doesn’t make what’s happening any less egregious.
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