Since she took the helm of CBS News a year ago, Bari Weiss has faced a steady drumbeat of criticism, and much of it has carried a familiar undertone: that a journalist who openly supports Israel and speaks out against antisemitism cannot be trusted to run a major American newsroom. The latest round came this week, after a media newsletter reported that veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl privately considered leaving the program over Weiss’s editorial involvement in a segment on Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
According to Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, the segment had been moving toward broadcast with only light notes until Weiss and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, joined screenings late in the week and offered extensive feedback. The report doesn’t say what changes they wanted. It says only that their concerns went beyond any single fact. Forelle reportedly suggested holding the story to give everyone more time to address the feedback, and Stahl pushed to resolve the issues on the spot. Status reported that Stahl, who has been with the program since 1991, then “privately floated” quitting.
CBS rejected that account outright. A network spokesman told Mediaite the story was “a ludicrous, twisted narrative,” noting that every 60 Minutes piece goes through a rigorous editorial process and that this segment “received far fewer edits than most.” A source familiar with the matter said the problem was mostly timing: the segment didn’t reach senior editors until Thursday afternoon, leaving only until Sunday night to refine it.
The episode follows a pattern. A segment that portrays Israelis in a harsh light gets the ordinary scrutiny any sensitive story deserves, and the editor’s questions are treated as a scandal. Coverage of Israel by Western media outlets has long drawn complaints from Jewish communities about lack of context, reliance on one-sided sourcing, and a tendency to present the actions of a small extremist fringe as representative of the whole country. Asking hard questions about such a segment, they argue, is what editors are supposed to do, especially at a time when antisemitic incidents remain high and media framing of Israel can have real consequences for Jews around the world.
The CBS source also pushed back on the notion that Weiss and Forelle are out of their depth. After more than a year at the network, the source said, they “are not neophytes,” and both have strong credentials. Forelle is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Weiss has faced performative pushback from within before. Correspondent Scott Pelley reportedly accused her in a closed-door meeting of “murdering” the program. She also drew criticism for pulling a Sharyn Alfonsi segment on deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison shortly before broadcast, reportedly because it lacked a substantive response from the Trump administration. Alfonsi, who argued that the administration’s silence was itself a response, left the program in May.
