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A lot of us have been wondering what will become of CBS News in the wake of that sixteen-million-dollar settlement over President Trump’s bogus lawsuit; the takeover of Paramount (its parent company) by David Ellison, a movie guy whose dad is one of the world’s richest men; and the appointment of Bari Weiss, founder of a site with a proclivity for conservative opinion pieces, as the division’s editor in chief.

Still, we can be a little hopeful, right? So I tuned in to 60 Minutes Sunday evening wanting to see if this show, among the most lauded and profitable news programs in television history, is keeping its standards intact. 

Now, one anecdote is not a trend, and Weiss has been at the helm of CBS News for just a few weeks. But a fawning segment on Peter Attia—a bestselling author, popular podcaster, and longevity doctor—shows there is plenty to be done to rebuild 60 Minutes. 

Attia charges his elite clients more than a hundred thousand dollars to give them a battery of tests and then provide a mix of both obvious advice and interesting, if quirky, regimens. He’s certainly newsworthy, but this thirteen-minute profile was more Home Shopping Network than Mike Wallace, with host Norah O’Donnell chugging away on a treadmill and then breathlessly (in the literal and figurative senses) parroting Attia’s ideas. 

Some of Attia’s tips, like getting more exercise or developing strong personal relationships, are widely accepted ways to enjoy a longer, healthier life. But he is also given to shakier ideas, such as the use of rapamycin, an antirejection medication usually given to transplant recipients, as a longevity-enhancer. The efficacy of the drug for longevity is unconfirmed, and there are some significant side effects. His advice to get full-body, preventive MRIs is likewise questionable, given the many false positives and expensive, invasive procedures that can follow.

But you wouldn’t know about concerns over Attia’s medical advice until near the end of the segment, when O’Donnell says, in voice-over, “There are physicians, including a respected professor of public health we spoke to, who are skeptical that his extraordinary regimen will result in an extra decade of healthy life.” She never identifies this “respected professor” or what that skepticism is about. She then asks Attia, “When a fellow physician calls some of what you’re talking about ‘hocus-pocus’?”

Attia bats away such vague criticism: “People are entitled to think what they want. And just because someone is a physician doesn’t mean they’re even remotely equipped to evaluate the merits of exercise physiology. Remember, I went to Stanford Medical School, right? How many hours of education do you think I received on exercise?… Zero hours. And how many hours did I receive on nutrition? Zero hours.… It was twenty-five years ago, so maybe things have changed. But I’m pretty sure that if you’re talking to other esteemed physicians, they’re in the same bucket as me. So, you know, they might not be the ones that are best equipped to be my critics.”

Well, it isn’t hard to find on-the-record skeptics. In a 2024 New Yorker profile of Attia, Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania oncologist and bioethicist, is quoted saying that “no one’s got that evidence” that Attia’s approach will work. (He also appears to be the source of O’Donnell’s “hocus-pocus” quote.) Eric Topol, a cardiologist with more than thirteen hundred peer-reviewed articles, added that Attia’s theory of medicine “is that you get this long life where you’re healthy, and then you fall off a cliff. It would be great if it were true. There isn’t any evidence for it.”

The New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad reported this week that Weiss wants to shake up 60 Minutes and that the network is aware of how soft some of the program segments can be, with one source using the term “afternoon cable fare.” There’s not much evidence in Weiss’s background that she can restore 60 Minutes to its glory days, but removing puff pieces would be a great way to start.

Before dawn one day in April 2019, Jordan Silverman woke to see a SWAT team and a squad of police and FBI agents on the porch of his Washington, DC, home. The officers stormed inside, confiscated his electronics, and handcuffed but didn’t arrest him. They were investigating allegations that Silverman had abused young children while working at a preschool run by the Washington Hebrew Congregation.

As rumors swirled, Silverman lost his job, lost joint custody of his two sons, and faced constant harassment. He received threatening mail with letters cut from magazines, conveying messages like “Evidence is mounting you sick fuck” and “You aint worth the blood that runs in your veins.” People spray-painted “child rapist” in front of his house and smashed a window and taillight of his car.

And then, after eighteen months of investigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills, he was cleared. The cops even issued an unusual public statement: “After exhausting all investigative avenues, the US Attorney’s Office found that there was insufficient probable cause to establish that an offense occurred or to make an arrest.” The children’s claims about Silverman were inconsistent, and it appears that parents of the preschoolers goaded authorities without much hard evidence.

Silverman opened up about his case to Radley Balko, an independent journalist who published a remarkably detailed and candid account on his Substack. It is not an easy read, given the nature of the allegations and the length of the story—around thirteen thousand words. But it fills in a lot of gaps that you won’t find in other reporting, including a credulous piece at the Daily Beast. Balko correctly characterizes some of the media’s coverage as “sensationalist,” “conspiratorial,” and failing to “entertain the possibility that Silverman might be innocent.”

Balko spent more than two years digging into files and clips and interviewing witnesses, experts, and, most important, Silverman himself. Set aside some time to read it. You’ll be saddened, but you won’t be sorry.

It seemed like a nice gesture at the time. A developer was planning a new community, with five hundred and sixty single-family homes and apartments across a hundred twenty-five acres near Mooresville, North Carolina, about thirty miles from Charlotte. And the company was so eager to get the project done, it promised to pay fifteen million dollars for a connector road that would alleviate some of the traffic congestion.

That was three years ago. And while the housing project is underway, it turns out that taxpayers—not the developer—will be paying that fifteen million for the one-mile, two-lane road.

The story of how that switcheroo happened comes to us thanks to a lot of digging by Dan Kane, an investigative reporter at the Raleigh News & Observer. He goes into the gnarly details of how well-connected lobbyists and builders, who’d been sending hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to key legislators, managed to finagle the appropriation into the state budget. Residents were stunned to find out they and other taxpayers were stuck with the bill. “That’s not right,” said Kevin Parson, who has lived in the area for thirty years. “Our government doesn’t just all of a sudden decide to pay that much money so the developer doesn’t have to pay for it.”  

And this article isn’t a one-off. The News & Observer’s Power and Secrecy page is packed with more than thirty stories published over the past sixteen months, detailing how legislators have been cutting deals to profit themselves and their benefactors.

A lot of good things can happen when journalists aggregate links. They point you to stories you might have missed, or essays that run counter to the conventional wisdom, or simply drive traffic to sites that deserve it.

But sometimes, aggregation veers closer to theft. Which is what happened recently at New York magazine. 

Let’s start with the original story: this deeply reported New York Times piece about 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan, a skinny, 102-floor luxury apartment tower about six blocks from Central Park. Dionne Searcey, Stefanos Chen, and Urvashi Uberoy take you into the innards of the building, which may not be a place you want to live, even if you just dropped fifteen million dollars on a three-bedroom apartment. The trio pored through thousands of pages of court filings, public records, and emails to learn why this condominium tower “is pockmarked and gouged, riddled with hundreds of cracks that suggest the slender structure is being overtaxed by wind and rain.” As one expert told the Times, “a ten-year-old building should not be showing that level of deterioration. Nobody can argue that that is not a failure.” 

It isn’t just a problem for the buyers. “Chunks of concrete will fall off, and windows will start loosening up,” one engineer warned. “There’s no sidewalk shed that’s going to protect you from chunks of concrete popping off a 1,400-foot building.” 

A story like this gets a lot of attention, especially in the media-heavy market that surrounds the Times. It got more attention than it should have, though, in New York magazine, which ran an 816-word rip-off that mostly regurgitated the meticulous work the actual reporters had done. While New York did credit the Times, it rehashed so many of the choice details and quotes that it’s hard to imagine readers seeking out the original piece.

Two months ago, federal agents mounted a series of drug raids in New England. They announced that they’d made “171 cartel-member arrests,” and a top DEA official proclaimed, “We’re not going after low-level retail drug traffickers.”

Here are some of the kingpins the feds arrested: A man accused of shoplifting Jolly Ranchers from a grocery store. A woman who allegedly crashed a car into a bank. And a guy who was charged with a drug sale but didn’t even have to post bail. As his dad said, “He’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel. He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.” 

This all comes to light thanks to a quintet of Boston Globe Spotlight (yes, that Spotlight!) reporters: Andrew Ryan, Hanna Krueger, Joey Flechas, Steven Porter, and Amanda Milkovits. They found that the DEA’s web caught more users than dealers, and those who were selling drugs were at the bottom rungs of the trade. “If there had been even a mid-level cartel member arrested, they would have named him,” said a former DEA chief of international operations. “But they didn’t name anybody.… The cartel likely doesn’t even know who these people are.”

Hat tip to David Beard for the final item. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

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