Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.
Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.
But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”
Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-7-2026?publication_id=20533&post_id=201093094&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo4NTEzMzczLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyMDEwOTMwOTQsImlhdCI6MTc4MDg5MzE0NCwiZXhwIjoxNzgzNDg1MTQ0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjA1MzMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.-BLBVmxonT4zgJ9lfD4mdNmB_n1z_DteWxhgdyxKQXI&r=52gyl&triedRedirect=true

