Holes in the CBS/Trump 'kill switch' story

Conflicting claims, a meta-wormhole, and why hot takes are burying the truth.

The latest proof that the news is broken.

There’s a raging media story underway, involving the Trump administration, a news network, and a massively wealthy corporation. As usual, people across the news industry are expressing “opinions” about it that are devoid of facts.

Piling onto such stories with hot takes is tempting. It’s how talking heads get clicks. But it makes everything worse. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of claims.

What we know: CBS pulled a 60 Minutes story involving a notorious El Salvador prison, where some people deported by the Trump administration have been sent. Because CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, which has business reasons to be in Trump’s good graces, alarms were raised about the decision.

Corporate interests should never get in the way of reporting, but they do all the time. That’s one of the many giant problems plaguing the news industry, as I explained in Media Money Mess.

But here’s what most of the media won’t tell you: We don’t yet know exactly what happened here.

Take this example. PBS brought on CNN “media analyst” Brian Stelter, who never holds CNN, or the rest of the mainstream media, responsible for its epic failures. The existence of this segment says so much — Big Media talking with Big Media about Big Media, creating a meta-wormhole.

I’m bolding part of this PBS segment for emphasis:

“The new editor in chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, said the segment would eventually run, but it needed comment from a Trump administration official. But ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi condemned that decision, writing in an internal e-mail that they did reach out to the administration and heard nothing back.

Alfonsi wrote -- quote -- ‘If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a kill switch for any reporting they find inconvenient.’”

But here’s Axios. Again, the bolding is mine:

“Two sources familiar with the situation said the administration did provide comment from different departments in response to inquiries from ‘60 Minutes’ journalists, but that their comments were not included in the draft of the segment first shown to Weiss on Thursday afternoon.”

In a follow-up, Axios added, “According to a source familiar with ‘60 Minutes’ correspondence with the administration, the ‘60 Minutes’ team reached out to press officials at the White House, State Department and DHS, all of which provided comment to CBS News.”

Which is it? CBS either “heard nothing” or did receive comment. It can’t be both. Maybe they received comments after Alfonsi wrote that. If so, why?

We also don’t know whether any comments provided were editorially relevant. For example, I might ask Acme Corporation, “Why did you lie about XYZ?” The company might reply, “We are the greatest company that has ever existed.” This happens often. People or agencies provide irrelevant replies and unthinking journalists assume they have to report those replies verbatim. Instead, they should simply say that Acme did not answer the question.

Wariness all around

The 60 Minutes segment aired in Canada. Some people are trying to dissect it now. But that doesn’t make clear what was left out or may have been wrong.

Suspicion of corporate interference is crucial. But there’s also good reason to be suspicious of 60 Minutes. That’s harder for some people to understand, since it was thought of as being a gold standard in news. But the show has had numerous recent journalistic disasters. I discussed some here:

Media Hypocrisy Alert: Trump, Qatar and Truth

Listen to this episode for more:

One example: 60 Minutes aired lying pro-terror radical Mohsen Mahdawi, a George Santos-level fabricator, without bothering to check his story. An independent journalist in the UK, David Collier, did so, and immediately discovered proof that it was made up. Mahdawi went on to alter his story multiple times in hopes of getting away with it. Other Big Media, including the New York Times, helped him.

The new 60 Minutes report at issue includes someone from Human Rights Watch, a corrupt, bigoted group. It says a lot that one of the nations with the world’s worst human rights records, Qatar, has a documented record of providing HRW with millions in funding, according to NGO Monitor. That doesn’t mean the individual interviewed by CBS is wrong, of course. But as a fact checker, I know better than to implicitly trust anything HRW says.

So, as unpopular as it may be to acknowledge this, it will take time to find out what happened here.

As I’ve explained on the show, in the attention economy, jumping in with hot takes puts you on a bullet train. By focusing on truth, They Stand Corrected goes against the market. It takes support to help fuel this truth train up the hill!

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