CBS News remained roiled on Monday by fallout from the decision by its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, to abruptly postpone a segment of Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was critical of the Trump administration.
Amid a swirl of questions within her newsroom, Ms. Weiss was adamant that the segment, which featured the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the United States to a prison in El Salvador, was flawed and required more reporting.
“I held that story because it was not ready,” Ms. Weiss, who joined CBS News in October, told colleagues at the top of a 9 a.m. editorial call with the newsroom, according to a recording of her remarks. She said that while the testimony of the imprisoned men was “very powerful,” other news organizations had already reported their basic story.
“The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment in this prison,” Ms. Weiss said, adding that if “60 Minutes” wanted to feature the story, “we simply need to do more.”
That viewpoint found little sympathy within “60 Minutes.” The show’s staff and correspondents convened for a somber Monday afternoon meeting, where the correspondent Scott Pelley expressed frustration at Ms. Weiss’s handling of the situation and raised questions about her management style. He asked why she had weighed in at the last minute after not attending five screenings of the segment as it was being completed.
“It’s not a part-time job,” Mr. Pelley said, according to four people familiar with the discussion who requested anonymity to describe a private exchange.
Ms. Weiss’s decision to postpone the segment did not prevent it from trickling into public view. Internet sleuths discovered on Monday that a Canadian network had briefly published the segment, and a bootleg version of the video began circulating on social media.
The past 24 hours have cast a glare on simmering tensions between the old guard of CBS News, the former home of Walter Cronkite, and Ms. Weiss, the opinion writer and editor behind the upstart website The Free Press, who took over with virtually no experience in television.
That the pulled segment was critical of the Trump administration has added to the turmoil.
Ms. Weiss reports directly to David Ellison, the head of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, who is making a multibillion-dollar hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the outcome of which Mr. Trump has said he’ll be “involved in.” On Monday, Mr. Ellison’s father, Larry, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, announced that he would personally guarantee $40.4 billion in equity as part of the bid.
Ms. Weiss’s allies say she makes editorial decisions without regard to the views of Mr. Ellison. She had also expressed her concern over the weekend that the “60 Minutes” segment did not advance the story, in an internal email reviewed by The New York Times.
Allies of Ms. Weiss argue that as editor in chief, she has a clear prerogative to weigh in on any of the journalism produced by her newsroom. Still, even some of her supporters privately conceded on Monday that she was still learning the ropes of broadcast journalism and that she had mishandled the timing of her feedback.
The segment, reported by the correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, was first screened for CBS journalists on Dec. 12; Ms. Weiss did not attend that screening or four others over the next week, a person with direct knowledge of the screenings said. She watched a video of the segment on Thursday night and offered suggestions, which producers integrated into the script. By Friday afternoon, “60 Minutes” had given CBS management the green light to announce and promote the segment to viewers.
Then, around midnight at the end of Friday, less than 48 hours before the segment was set to air, Ms. Weiss weighed in again, this time with more substantial requests. She asked producers to add a last-minute interview with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff — a relatively straightforward task for a print journalist who needs to only make a phone call, but a logistically difficult one in TV news, where a camera and lighting crew is often required.
“If we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice,” Ms. Weiss wrote in her internal note, which “60 Minutes” producers viewed as a more critical assessment than the one she had offered earlier in the week.
“60 Minutes,” the country’s most popular news program, has a long history of autonomy, and this week is hardly the first time its staff has bristled at interference from CBS News leadership. The show takes pride in a deliberative process where segments are edited and re-edited for weeks — a different rhythm from the fast-paced web journalism that Ms. Weiss oversaw at The Free Press.
Frustration with Ms. Weiss spilled out at the show’s Monday staff meeting, the four people familiar with the conversation said.
Mr. Pelley said that if Ms. Weiss planned to be more involved with editing “60 Minutes” stories, she should attend the early screenings and communicate directly with correspondents. “She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously,” he said.
Tanya Simon, the “60 Minutes” executive producer, told her staff that she and Ms. Weiss “had a good working relationship” and that she did not want “to ascribe motive and place blame” for the weekend’s events. She told the staff that she stood “100 percent behind Sharyn and her story,” and she referred to the segment as “thoroughly reported.”
On the 9 a.m. call, Ms. Weiss said she wanted a newsroom “where we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters and do so with respect.”
Hours later, Ms. Alfonsi — who accused the network on Sunday night of pulling her segment for “political” reasons — raised those comments during the meeting with her “60 Minutes” colleagues. She said Ms. Weiss had not contacted her directly with her concerns.
“Disagreement requires discussion,” Ms. Alfonsi said.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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