Bari Weiss has fired Claudia Milne, head of standards and practices at CBS News. Milne was reportedly a significant source of CBS’s “woke” orientation. Variety provides an account that is sympathetic to Ms. Milne. It quotes Milne’s farewell memo to her colleagues:
I believe our role as journalists is to hold the powerful to account.
Actually, your role is to report the news. Accurately.
We are here to question and challenge our political leaders on behalf of our audiences, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative….
When did you ever question and challenge Barack Obama? Or Joe Biden? Did your reporters ever mention the fact that Biden was patently senile? And far from challenging Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign, you edited her interview to make her sound far more coherent than she actually was.
…we must interrogate the social media companies that want to control our attention, the businesses that manage our healthcare and the institutions that shape our education system.
How about interrogating the news organizations that try to control our access to the news, manage the flow of information to us consumers, and shape our political opinions? CBS News has been interrogated and found wanting.
The New York Post adds this:
Claudia Milne, who ran the division responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming, is the first senior executive to leave the network….
The entire concept of a “division responsible for the moral, ethical and legal implications of CBS programming” is misguided or worse. CBS News’s only moral, ethical and legal responsibility is to report the news accurately and fairly. But Milne evidently saw things differently:
As previously reported by The Post, in 2023, Milne and then-news division president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews banned staffers from using the word “transgender” when reporting on the Nashville shooter.
The decision sparked outrage at the network because police working the case had identified the killer, Audrey Hale, as a transgender woman. Sources said Ciprian-Matthews and Milne spent 15 minutes telling staffers not to report Hale’s identity because it may not be relevant to the shooter’s motive.
Then again, it may be. And there is legitimate controversy over the seeming link between mass shooters and transgenderism.
Milne was also one of the executives who blocked former CBS News correspondent Catherine Herridge from interviewing [Elon] Musk in 2023, The Post has learned. Herridge declined to comment.
Herridge said on X that she’d had the rare opportunity to interview Musk after his high-profile purchase of the social media platform. …
But the interview opportunity landed with a thud, Herridge recounted on X, because Musk wanted to do it live. CBS execs said they would rather pass on the session than hold it live because they were worried about what Musk was going to say, according to the former investigative reporter.
Ha ha ha ha! They didn’t dare interview Elon live because they weren’t sure what he might say. I guess if predictability is your standard, you can only interview Democrats. And you won’t make news, either.
Another surprising moment in which Milne played a part was last year’s criticism of “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil after he grilled author Ta-Nehisi Coates over his one-sided polemic against Israel, which the writer compared to an “apartheid” state.
Milne evidently favored the “apartheid” slur.
Back to Variety for a final note:
More recently, CBS News agreed to only present live interviews on “Face the Nation,” giving up its ability to edit out falsehoods or stonewalling by guests.
It is convenient, if you want to run a partisan “news” show, to be able to edit out a guest’s “falsehoods or stonewalling” without your viewers knowing it. CBS News apparently has been terrified of live interviews, because the interviewee might puncture the network’s liberal narratives.
No doubt getting rid of Claudia Milne was a good move, but it looks as though Bari Weiss has a long way to go to shape up CBS News.
