Bari Weiss Sends Scorching Email to CBS Staff: ‘No Amount of Outrage… Will Derail Us’

(Gilberto Tadday/TED)

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss sent a staff memo Wednesday revealing that her decision to pull a controversial deportation piece from Sunday’s broadcast was part of an overall effort to restore trust in news.

Ben Mullin, media reporter with The New York Times, posted the memo to X.

“Right now, the majority of Americans say they do not trust the press. It isn’t because they’re crazy,” Weiss wrote, adding, “To win back their trust we have to work hard.”

Weiss listed off ways that 60 Minutes coverage can restore that trust. She added, “No amount of outrage  — whether from activist organizations or the White House — will derail us. We are not out to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media. We are out to inform the American public and to get the story right.”

“Restoring the integrity of the news is a difficult task,” Weiss wrote. “We can’t think of a more important one.”

Weiss ended the memo, “Merry Christmas — and thank you, especially to everyone who is working over this holiday.”

Weiss came under fire after spiking a segment on the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s high-security CECOT prison right before it was set to air Sunday.

She justified her decision by arguing the report did not properly reflect the Trump administration’s position or legal reasoning for the deportations, and said the segment “paints an incongruent picture” after producers failed to secure adequate responses from senior Trump officials.

The White House did provide a comment for the 60 Minutes segment, but CBS producers chose not to use it, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.

“60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to CBS News’s request for comment.

60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi trashed Weiss’s decision to kill her story as a “political one” which amounted to “corporate censorship” in her own scathing internal memo to staff.

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