Phil Napoli Professor at Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy
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Sixty minutes was in the news last night, but not for the obvious reasons. Instead, it turned out that a report that was supposed to air last night was shelved at the last minute. It was a segment featuring the accounts of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador. Now one of its own correspondents fears the program is being dismantled. Some employees, according to CNN, are threatening to quit, Phil Nepoli is a professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and joins us now. Phil, how are you? I'm good, thanks. So this was a move made apparently on Saturday by Barry Wise, who is now the CBS News editor and chief, the reporter who put together the report and figured it was a done deal according to its timeline released today by CNN, she went home to Texas on Friday, she believes now that this is purely political. And I guess this was the concern that many had when Barry Wise wound up assuming command at CBS News earlier this year. Right. And my understanding is it was reviewed five times and given the green light to air, and that Barry Wise opted to hold it because it didn't include an official statement from the White House, which of course raises the question about whether it is political or not, because you can imagine it's all reporting about political matters waited until an official statement was released from whatever government agency, White House, et cetera, becomes a de facto way of spiking any story. Exactly. And this coming from Barry Wise has an incredible amount of irony because she started something called the Free Press, and she built her platform after she left the New York Times on being a free speech advocate. And now she won't run a report unless the White House has something to say about it seems to find the face of what she was about. Yeah, it does and the Free Press really wasn't journalistic in the most rigorous sense to begin with. It was really an opinion outlet, and that was another one of the concerns here when she moved to this position was that this is somebody who's expertise and experiences in opinion not really in robust journalism and the practices and norms around that. At her heart, Barry Wise is not a journalist, and I think that's one thing that I find so interesting about her rise at CBS here, and I guess that is going to be one of the things that's very interesting about this as it goes forward here is she's basically ordering a group of journalists when she was never one herself, is that that seems just a natural recipe for conflict. Absolutely, and it's sort of indicative of the larger problem we've been facing in journalism over the past decade and a half or so, maybe even longer, which is, you know, the boundaries around who is and who is not a journalist, and what is and what is not journalism have been allowed to get very fuzzy for a variety of reasons, and I think it would be wonderful if the pendulum started to swing back the other way and we were a little more stringent about what we call journalism. As for the piece itself, it was reviewed according to various reports five times by attorneys, by standards and practices at CBS. German Contain, who has submitted several many pieces, in fact, for CBS News over the years, tweeted out today that he had lots of investigative pieces over 60 across eight years. They were screened in his words three times.
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