Cecilia Vega, the former 60 Minutes correspondent, said on Thursday she felt pressured by CBS News’s executives to incorporate “political bias” into segments for the broadcast program.
Vega made the remarks during an onstage interview with John Quiñones, the ABC News correspondent, at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ annual conference in New Orleans. Her comments were first reported by Status.
“I’ve gone head-to-head with editors for 25 years in this business,” Vega said, according to the New York Times. “But never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”
As she was wrapping up a segment on the deadly federal immigration operations in Minnesota, during which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shot two American citizens, Vega said, she was instructed to include footage of protesters attacking ICE agents, MS Now reported.
The footage did not exist, according to Vega.
She also was questioned on why she did not interview JD Vance for a segment on poverty in West Virginia. The piece was centered on the Trump administration’s slashes to Snap benefits, according to MS Now.
Vega also said she was asked to report on comments from the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, suggesting he wanted local police to fight federal immigration agents in the state, despite no evidence of such comments.
A spokesperson for CBS News did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Vega’s remarks.
When Vega was fired from the network this spring, she expressed concern for the flagship Sunday newsmagazine’s future, which has seen a leadership shakeup since Bari Weiss was appointed as CBS News’s editor-in-chief last October by Paramount’s CEO, David Ellison, a Trump ally. Weiss, who has no background in broadcast news, founded media startup the Free Press, which was acquired by Paramount, and is known for her critiques of liberal institutions and what she has deemed “cancel culture”.
“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions,” Vega said in a statement in May. “Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
“We respect Ms Vega and her contributions, but her claims are not based in reality,” a CBS spokesperson said at the time.
Weiss received scrutiny late last year after she delayed a segment about the federal government deporting hundreds of Venezuelans to a notorious El Salvador prison, citing a need for further reporting. The segment’s correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, called the decision “a political one”.
There has been a wave of firings at 60 Minutes since Weiss assumed the network mantle.
Veteran correspondent Scott Pelley blasted the cuts at the network, accusing Weiss in a tense meeting with 60 Minutes’ staffers of “murdering” the show. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that,” he said then. Pelley was fired following the clash.
