The former “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega on Thursday described pressure from executives at CBS News to insert what she said was political bias into three segments that aired this year.
Ms. Vega was among three of the show’s correspondents to be fired this spring and is now the third to go public with claims of executives’ interfering in the show’s reporting. The former correspondents Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi made similar accusations.
“I’ve gone head-to-head with editors for 25 years in this business,” Ms. Vega, 49, said Thursday, according to a recording of an interview she did with John Quiñones of ABC News at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference. She added, “But never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”
None of the changes Ms. Vega said executives had requested were incorporated into the shows.
“60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated TV news program, was roiled by the reporters’ accusations and by a shake-up this spring. Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief and a former opinion journalist, oversaw the firing of the show’s leadership team and the three correspondents. Ms. Weiss then hired a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker with no broadcast experience as its new head.
In the interview, Ms. Vega said that in January, as she was finishing a segment about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, executives asked her to add footage to show protesters attacking citizens that the demonstrators had incorrectly identified as ICE agents. They also asked her to find video of a police chief rolling his eyes during a news conference. She couldn’t find either, she said.
For a February segment about poverty in West Virginia, Ms. Vega said, she was asked to mention Vice President JD Vance, who had written about poverty in Ohio. She said the piece was not focused on politicians or political voices.
Later in the year, she said, executives told her to include a line in another segment saying that Iran was outgunned by the United States and Israel, which she called “an administration talking point.”
A CBS News spokesman, Jeremy Adler, pointed to a statement the network released in May, shortly after Ms. Vega was fired, saying that her allegations of pressure from executives were “not based in reality.” He cited the network’s recent coverage of the Trump administration. The spokesman also referred to a comment from Ms. Weiss in a recent interview, where she said that “what’s being called ‘editorial interference’” is “in reality the job description of an editor in chief.”
Status, a newsletter focused on the media industry, earlier reported on Ms. Vega’s remarks.
During the interview, Ms. Vega also described the day she was fired, saying she received an email inviting her to a videoconference in one hour. She said she was fired during a meeting that lasted less than two minutes, without a thorough explanation.
“I lost an amazing job,” Ms. Vega said. “The best job. And I’m very confused about why.”
The post Former ‘60 Minutes’ Correspondent Details Claims of Meddling appeared first on New York Times.
