Five days into the debacle, Weiss wrote a memo to staff to explain why she had yanked the story. It lectures her colleagues about basic journalistic fairness: In order to gain viewers’ trust, she says, journalists need to “work hard.” (Why, yes.) “Sometimes that means doing more legwork…And sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”
How to ensure that a story is “comprehensive and fair”? In another memo, Weiss elaborated that the CECOT story didn’t try hard enough to show the “genuine debate” about the legality of the deportations. Producers had already requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the White House, to no avail. But, Weiss wrote, they needed to ask again. “I tracked down cell numbers for [border czar Tom] Homan and [Stephen] Miller and sent those along.”
Weiss is right, of course, that journalists should work hard to capture “genuine debate.” But the CECOT segment was not about the legal issues around deporting people to the prison. It was about what happened to them once they got there: Food deprivation, stress positions, isolation. Torture.
Was Weiss saying that there is a “genuine debate” about whether these things happened? How would Stephen Miller’s view help us assess that?
Maybe someday the CECOT piece will air, perhaps with some on-camera comment from Stephen Miller about how “third world” immigrants deserve what they get. But whatever we learn from the story at that point won’t tell us as much as what we’ve already learned.
In authoritarian regimes, you sometimes find independent reporting and public expressions of dissent. Even in the old Soviet Union, they let some of that slide. But “letting it slide” is the point. You are meant to know that what you are allowed to see has been approved by the people in charge.
So too, now, with CBS News. There are still great journalists working there, and great stories being published. But now we know that these stories will only be seen when the bosses allow it. And not all those bosses are working at CBS News.
If I were not part of a nonprofit, reader-supported newsroom, that melancholy note might be the one to end on. But luckily, because I work for Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, I get to say one more thing: We—you, me, millions of other Americans—don’t have to settle for this.
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