Status founder and veteran media reporter Oliver Darcy joined his executive editor Jon Passantino on their Power Lines podcast Friday to go through the bombshell leaked audio from a highly contentious CBS News editorial meeting earlier in the week.
Darcy reported on the meeting Tuesday evening, in which CBS News’s foreign editor Shayndi Raice dresses down her staff and warns that not following her directives is “called insubordination” and “it’s legal grounds for firing.”
The meeting was called following internal backlash to edits on 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl’s segment on Israeli settler violence and the handling of a report by CBS News correspondent Holly Williams, in which Williams’s mention of the death toll in Gaza was removed by higher-ups.
“Oliver, we have exclusively obtained this audio of this meeting. You got it after doing some incredible reporting on this this week. What do we have here?” Passantino began in the podcast.
“What are we going to be hearing?” he added.
“So we have the entire meeting. There is a lot of audio here, so we’re going to take through it piece by piece. The first bit of audio we want to play is, you know, this is in chronological order. This is where Shayndi Raice talks about the idea that she is editorially interfering with the reporting that’s happening at CBS News,” Darcy explains. Raice is then heard fuming:
The idea that an editor should not have an opinion on editorial content is completely anathema to everything that I know about the way a newsroom works. And I’m not just speaking about Bari Weiss and her editorial interference here. Speaking about my own.
I am not here to be a logistician. I am not here to get you from one place to the other. That’s not why I was hired.
And honestly, it’s not what I want to be doing. What I’m here to do is to discuss stories, to give my insights into stories, to help you and push you to be better. And this is another thing that I really, I don’t understand this and I’m struggling really to understand this.
But like this idea that somebody writes a script and somebody comes up with a story idea, writes a script and nobody above them is allowed to have any comments on it. That’s not journalism. I’m sorry.
Journalism is a process where you are challenged, you are pushed to dig deeper, to do more, to try harder, not just to be fair, but to be smarter, right? And like, listen, at the Wall Street Journal, we had many, many, many layers of editing to the point where it was sort of like a joke, you know? But I can tell you that 95% of the time, each level of editing made a story stronger and smarter.
And that is why their journalism is the best journalism, I think, that’s coming out of a major news organization in America today. Okay? And, you know, I understand that I come from the print world and that this is TV and I’m here to learn from all of you, but also you can learn from me too.
I have experience, I have knowledge, I have editing talent and I have editorial judgment that I can bring to the table. And you will get a lot out of your job if you work with me and collaborate with me, hear my opinions, take my feedback, let me push you because I’m not pushing you for any other reason than I want the journalism to be the absolute best it can be. I want it to be the smartest, I want it to be the sharpest, and I don’t want excuses.
We only have a minute-thirty. And it’s your job to make it smart in a minute-thirty. You can be smart. Okay?
“Okay,” Darcy reacted as Passantino added, “Wow. Yeah, that was a lot. The tone there is the thing that strikes me first.”
“Oliver, so again, just to set the stage here, this is the foreign editor who’s based out of London, talking to all of the foreign reporters, correspondents, editors, everybody involved in production across CBS News. She’s fired up here in the wake of our reporting at Status on the reporting that Holly Williams had done for CBS Evening News, in which certain parts of the reporting were struck from this package. We’re going to hear from Holly in a bit, her response to all of this, but this is her really laying down the law as the boss,” Passantino continued, adding:
I have to be honest, I’ve been an editor in the newsroom for a long time, and that is a pretty tough tone to use with your staff there. Definitely mom talking down to the kids saying, I know better than you. I’m not interfering if I put in, which is weird that she’s calling it her opinion, by the way, but she’s using that word.
Her opinion needs to be considered in the reporting. I can only imagine how people were reacting in real time to this.
Darcy agreed, “Yeah, they thought it was deeply disrespectful the way she’s lecturing them. These are accomplished journalists that she’s talking to, and she doesn’t even understand the process because she says, she sets up the straw man that it’s not journalism to just write a script and it goes on air. Well, that’s not the way it works at CBS News.” He added:
That’s not the way it works at any network. These journalists are working with producers. They’re getting the script done.
Then it goes to standards review. It might be reviewed by lawyers. Then the executive producer and the senior producer on the show that it’s going to air, they review it and have input.
My understanding is at times there are dozens of people working on or looking at a story. So the idea that a correspondent just concocts a story and it ends up on air is not how things work. Maybe she doesn’t understand that because she’s brand new there, but that’s not how things work.
Later in the discussion, Darcy and Passantino discuss the Williams edit, “What’s happening here is, I think, pretty obvious, which is that they are trying to introduce doubt upon that number and say maybe it’s not actually as bad as they’re saying it is. After defending the interference in the Israel story on the October 7th story and after laying down the law, Shayndi then makes it very clear that those who are not falling in line could very much lose their jobs.”
Raice is then heard saying:
And you don’t get to decide over me or over anybody else or over Bill or over Pete or over Bari Weiss or over Tom Cibrowski. You don’t get to decide what gets published on this network. This is not your publishing platform.
This is a company that we all work for and there’s a hierarchy in place. And at the end of the day, you have to answer to that hierarchy. You can’t answer to that hierarchy.
And you don’t listen to what we say. That is called insubordination! And it’s legal grounds for firing.
Watch the full clip above via Status.
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