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In the early sixties, when the CBS Building was under construction on West Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, engineers developed a new granite-finishing process to achieve the rough black facade specified by the skyscraper’s architect. More than eight million pounds of granite were torched with five-thousand-degree heat in a process known as thermal stippling, the New York Times reported. Then the granite was blasted with highly pressurized water filled with glass beads the size of salt grains in a process known as liquid honing to revive the stone’s original color.

CBS journalists left the building, known as Black Rock, around the turn of the century, most migrating to offices on West Fifty-Seventh Street. It is there that CBS News, in the past three months, has undergone another round of scorching heat and intense pressure, revealing, for better or worse, the true colors of the Tiffany Network’s executives, producers, and journalists.

Bari Weiss’s ascent to the top editorial job in October—after being chosen by the Trump era’s newest media moguls, the Ellison family, to shake up CBS News—sparked a flurry of predictions. At the time, I wrote for CJR that CBS journalists were concerned because Weiss “speaks their language of reporting ethics and journalistic values, but is afflicted in practice by a ‘bothsidesism’ and ‘faux balance’ that always tends to favor the same team.” Her impact is being felt more quickly than I expected, both in the content CBS is promoting and in what’s getting the chop.

Last Saturday, Tony Dokoupil debuted as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, the chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite. Dokoupil, a former cohost of CBS Mornings, came to national attention in 2024 when he sharply challenged Ta-Nehisi Coates over the latter’s book The Message, which was critical of Israel. Weiss’s decision to promote Dokoupil, who is forty-five and as polished as a Netflix lead, was made, according to reports, after she was unable to lure Bret Baier away from Fox News. Before beginning his new job, Dokoupil released a video monologue in which he said that “on too many stories, the press has missed the story” by giving “too much weight” to the views of academics and elites as opposed to ordinary Americans. He also announced five principles that would guide his broadcasting, including “We love America.”

Paramount said that in Dokoupil’s first two weeks, he would take the CBS Evening News on the road, visiting ten American cities as if the show were a traveling fair. But the company may not have anticipated that his opening days would be as lurching and nausea-inducing as an amusement park ride. There have been technical challenges, conspicuous patriotism, and plenty of bothsidesism, notably Dokoupil’s report on the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis, which was so middle-of-the-road that it seemed marooned on a patch of scrubland between freeway lanes. But what feels most significant to me has been the program’s marked shift in tone—seemingly in favor of the Trump administration—since Dokoupil took over.

The Daily Beast, Dokoupil’s former employer, has labeled him “MAGA coded,” and his early coverage has done nothing to dispel that description. There was his gentle interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after the administration attacked Venezuela in an apparent breach of US and international law—“Do you believe legally you need to ask Congress for approval?” Dokoupil asked—and the program’s ride-along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as she participated in ICE raids in Minneapolis. And of course, there was Dokoupil’s bizarre sign-off from Miami on Tuesday, after a lighthearted array of internet memes depicted Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, as the shah of Iran and the Michelin man. “These memes may not add up to much, but for Rubio’s hometown fans, which are many around here in Miami, it’s a sign of how Florida, once an American punch line, has become a leader on the world stage,” Dokoupil said. “Marco Rubio, we salute you; you’re the ultimate Florida man.” The White House shared the clip approvingly on X. One network staffer told The Independent it was like watching “state TV.”

Alongside its newly conciliatory tone, CBS has reportedly suppressed stories deemed unflattering to the administration. On December 21, Weiss abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment that CBS News had been promoting. The report, which was axed three hours before it was scheduled to air, concerned CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison where the Trump administration deported more than two hundred and fifty Venezuelan migrants last year. Weiss had serious concerns about the piece, according to Semafor, and the network held the segment “pending comment or an interview with White House officials.” (The broadcast noted that officials had declined interview requests from 60 Minutes.) Her decision came a few days after Donald Trump had attacked CBS News for unfavorable coverage.

Weiss’s move sparked immediate backlash inside and outside the newsroom, not least from the segment’s reporter, Sharyn Alfonsi, a 60 Minutes correspondent. Writing to colleagues, in an email posted in full on X by CNN’s Brian Stelter, Alfonsi said that Weiss “spiked our story” despite its being “cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.” The move was “not an editorial decision,” Alfonsi wrote, “it is a political one,” adding that requiring comment from the administration effectively handed the White House a “kill switch” to block inconvenient stories. 

Meanwhile, the unauthorized segment had already been uploaded to the streaming app of a Canadian station, Global TV, and soon turned up elsewhere online. Paramount began filing copyright claims—a game of whack-a-mole to scrub the bootleg version from the Web—but by the end of that week, Weiss’s decision had yielded a textbook case of the Streisand effect (when censorship efforts backfire by drawing far more attention than their target would have garnered on its own). The report raises allegations of brutal conditions in the prison, including torture and sexual abuse, with on-camera testimony from two people deported from the US to El Salvador last year; toward the end, it features students from UC Berkeley explaining the open-source-intelligence (OSINT) tactics that helped verify, among other things, the testimony of former prisoners.

Weiss sent a memo to 60 Minutes producers outlining her decision, reported in full by Axios’s Sara Fischer. It is a revealing document for what it says about Weiss’s conceptions of journalism. The segment failed to advance the story, she wrote, noting that “we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT.” She suggested interviewing Tom Homan or Stephen Miller about deportation policy and called the OSINT element “strange.” Turning to whether Trump was exceeding his authority with his deportation policy, Weiss said, “There’s a genuine debate here.” She suggested coverage “with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority.” Weiss told producers, “If we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.”

I found Alfonsi’s leaked 60 Minutes report to be rigorous, informative, and fair. Watching it for myself after reading Weiss’s disparaging comments, I had the sensation—as I did seeing Dokoupil “saluting” Marco Rubio—that I might be going insane. This feeling, that demanding accountability is increasingly seen as disloyalty, rather than the duty of the Fourth Estate, is something I’m sure many journalists can relate to. It feels like sycophancy, not rigor, is what now reaps rewards, and organizations like CBS News appear willing to bend journalistic ethics out of all recognizable shape to avoid provoking a hostile administration.

Alfonsi warned that 60 Minutes risks changing “from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.” (On Friday, Status reported that another CBS segment critical of the administration, from Anderson Cooper and concerning US plans to accept white Afrikaners as refugees from South Africa, is stuck in a prolonged editorial review.) But Alfonsi—and other journalists and producers inside CBS News—are not going quietly. She showed her own true colors when she told colleagues: “I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.”

Other Notable Stories…

• In the days following the US attack on Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro, its authoritarian leader, Venezuelan security forces have cracked down on journalists and citizens. At least fourteen journalists were detained, the Times reported last week. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the detentions and said, “Venezuelan authorities must immediately end practices that expose journalists to surveillance and arbitrary detention, and ensure that the press can work safely and without fear.” On Thursday, the CPJ urged the release of three journalists still jailed. According to Espacio Público, a Venezuelan press freedom organization, CNN International’s Stefano Pozzebon was also deported from the country last Monday. Meanwhile, the Times and Washington Post have yet to respond to CJR’s questions about why they buried the scoop of the US military’s plan to conduct the attack, which the UN human rights office has said “undermined a fundamental principle of international law.”
  
• The killing of Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three, which took place just blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020, has sparked anti-ICE protests across the US. For The Guardian, Jeremy Barr analyzed the way cable news networks covered the events, noting the different headlines from Fox News (“Deadly ICE-Involved Shooting”), CNN (“ICE Officer Kills Woman in Minneapolis”), and MS NOW (“Agent Kills Woman”). In her first Laurels and Darts column for CJR, Susie Banikarim wrote about why federal officers were sent to Minnesota in the first place: a viral video from Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTuber, about fraud, which the Minnesota Star Tribune had been covering (with far more rigor and precision than Shirley) for more than a decade.
  
• After fifty-eight years, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last Monday that it would dissolve. The CPB, which oversaw the distribution of federal funds to NPR, PBS, and a system of more than fifteen hundred local public media stations, was defunded in July by the Trump administration. Ivan L. Nagy wrote for CJR about what the decision means. “In the absence of a federally funded CPB, the US might have to settle for a fragmented and uneven local media environment,” he writes. Nagy notes that the goal of defunding public media was laid out by the Heritage Foundation in Project 2025; the objective, one interviewee tells CJR, is “not only to stop funding public media, but also to replace it with outlets politically favorable to Trump.”
  
• In Iran, nationwide protests have been met with a brutal crackdown by the regime. Rights groups have warned of hundreds of casualties, and the Times reported that it had “verified videos of protester deaths and corpses lined up in body bags outside hospitals.” Since the Iranian government imposed a near-total internet blackout and blocked phone communications, on January 8, information has been challenging to access. Reporters Without Borders expressed “deep concern for Iranian journalists, particularly those covering the protest movement” and called for “the release of the 24 journalists detained in the country.”  
  
• Paramount Skydance’s hostile takeover effort for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, rumbles on. Last week, the WBD board told shareholders to reject another Paramount bid—this one for around a hundred and eight billion dollars—saying it was “inadequate” and had “significant” risks, and labeling it the “largest LBO [leveraged buyout] in history.” (Netflix and the WBD board agreed to a deal worth eighty-two million dollars on December 5, which the board hopes can be completed.) But Larry Ellison, a Trump ally and the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, has sought to assure Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders that Paramount’s offer is sound by personally guaranteeing the financing. (Ellison is, of course, one of the richest men in the world.) On Sunday, Trump weighed in on the saga, sharing an article to his Truth Social account titled: “Stop the Netflix Cultural Takeover.”
  
• And good news at Semafor, the media startup founded by Ben Smith in 2022. It has raised thirty million dollars in new financing, valuing the organization at over three hundred million dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported. Last year was Semafor’s first profitable one, with two million dollars in profits from forty million in revenue. Smith wrote last night: “News is a tough business, but its demise is overstated. The most discerning news consumers are desperate for information, insight, and the global dot-connecting that the best journalism does, and that technology can enhance but not replace.” Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin interviewed Smith recently for CJR’s Journalism 2050 podcast.

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