Fired “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega spilled damning new details about MAGA-friendly CBS News boss Bari Weiss’ efforts to tilt coverage and insert basic errors into her stories — among them U.S. states.
The Emmy-winning reporter spoke Thursday at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference in New Orleans, where she described three specific instances where she says management pushed her to shape stories in ways that favored the Trump administration’s narrative, reported The Daily Beast.
The most striking example was a report on the January ICE shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Vega says she was pressured to include footage of protesters attacking suspected plainclothes ICE officers — footage her team says didn’t exist. She was also asked to include a purported quote from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey allegedly urging police to confront ICE agents, but Vega said her team scoured each frame of the video and could find no such statement – which she labeled “misinformation.”
“That never happened,” she said. “We could not find any instance of the mayor saying something like that.”
On a story about the U.S.-Iran conflict, Vega says she was handed a suggested script line asserting Iran was “totally outgunned” by American and Israeli forces — language she flatly labeled an administration talking point.
It was a piece about SNAP benefit cuts in West Virginia that stunned Vega, she reported.
Vega’s decision to tell the story “strictly” through residents’ voices spurred a backlash because she hadn’t interviewed Vice President JD Vance or referencing his decade-old memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Vega was forced to point out it was a book about Ohio, not West Virginia.
Vega stopped short of naming Weiss directly as the source of the pressure, instead attributing it to “the new administration at CBS News.” But she made her suspicions clear, noting that friction escalated once new figures began appearing in editorial screenings to weigh in on her stories. She described “60 Minutes” as once having been an “island” — protected from outside influence — that no longer exists.
Weiss, who took over as editor-in-chief last year, has faced mounting criticism from within the network. She previously pulled a “60 Minutes” episode on a notorious El Salvador megaprison hours before air. Veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, fired in June, went further, accusing Weiss of “murdering” the show and being installed specifically to dismantle it.
“Never in my career until now have I felt that those edits, those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics,” Vega said. “That’s the difference.”
Vega said she never had an opportunity to speak with Weiss “one on one,” and she still doesn’t know why she was fired.
“It’s been about three months now… and I don’t know,” she said. “I was not given a reason. I still have not been given a reason.”
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