Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes Stumble Follows Private Rejection From Megyn Kelly

“Dismal,” “confused,” “demoralized,” “super fucked.” That, as one reporter tells Vanity Fair, is the mood inside CBS News this week—all because of Bari Weiss, about 14 minutes of television that criticized the Trump administration, and a Canadian streaming service, of all things.

Over the weekend, CBS News’ controversial new editor in chief abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment featuring interviews with several Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to CECOT, a notorious prison in El Salvador, without trial. Her decision caused an uproar both inside the network and online. Then the report was mistakenly uploaded by a Canadian network—allowing anyone with Wi-Fi to see the segment Weiss had tried to shelve. “I mean, it’s already out there, so now we just look like idiots,” the CBS reporter tells me. (A representative for CBS News did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)

The controversy is the latest in a series of hurdles for CBS News under Weiss, who was handpicked by new Paramount Skydance boss David Ellison to serve as the outlet’s editor in chief earlier this year after Paramount acquired The Free Press, a successful digital media start-up she cofounded. Before announcing a new CBS town hall and debate series, Weiss, according to two sources, spent weeks lobbying Megyn Kelly to participate in a debate on feminism with Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper, to no avail. This was before Weiss promoted Ben Shapiro’s broadside against Kelly at Turning Point’s annual conference, triggering a searing response from the conservative commentator.

“Bari, for all of her proselytizing about how bad cancel culture is, has not been canceled,” Kelly told me in an interview over the weekend. “She’s only ever been given opportunity after opportunity. And as she gets more powerful, she wants more and more censorship on her signature issue, which is Israel.”

CBS announced that the CECOT segment would not run just hours before 60 Minutes was set to air on Sunday night. In a scathing internal memo, Sharyn Alfonsi, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, objected to the decision. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in the Sunday memo—which was quickly leaked to several media reporters—per The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”