We watched 60 Minutes report on the Trump administration’s pressure on election officials and caught ourselves wondering how it had made it to air.
An unpleasant thing to think about a news program. An even less pleasant thing to realize you mean.
Lesley Stahl’s October 18 segment examined the strain the administration is placing on the voting system, with interviews featuring Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, and Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon. Here was a recognizable journalistic exercise: investigate the actions of powerful people, speak to those affected, ask the people responsible to explain themselves. We should have been thinking entirely about the reporting. Instead, part of our attention went to the company broadcasting it.
Would CBS still let its journalists do this? Apparently, yes. On this occasion.
That qualification is where the trouble lives.
Bari Weiss’s leadership of CBS News has given viewers reasons to ask questions that should ordinarily belong to the production meeting. Last December, she held a 60 Minutes investigation into Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. CBS said additional reporting was needed. Weiss and other network leaders subsequently defended the decision in a memo invoking fairness, comprehensiveness and the restoration of trust.
Restoring trust is an attractive ambition for a person who would like you to stop questioning their decisions.
Weiss is entitled to defend hers. Editors are supposed to exercise judgment, and a journalist’s conviction that a story is ready does not automatically settle the matter. There are legitimate reasons to delay important work. Precisely because those reasons exist, however, the language of editorial rigor cannot be accepted as its own evidence. The audience gets to consider what is held, what is broadcast and whether the standards appear consistent when the subject changes.
A news organization cannot make a public spectacle of its new editorial direction and then be surprised when people notice the direction.
What made Sunday’s broadcast worth watching was its attention to the people expected to keep elections functioning under pressure. Henderson described resisting federal demands for confidential voter information and being placed under investigation. Dhillon defended the administration’s actions. Stahl pressed her about the purpose and scale of the investigations. Henderson, meanwhile, separated the ability to conduct fair elections from the willingness of losing candidates to accept them.
That distinction deserves more attention than another televised argument about whether Americans have “confidence” in elections. Confidence can be damaged. It can also be deliberately cultivated around a falsehood. Its presence tells us something about what people believe, which is not quite the same as telling us what happened.
A reporter’s job is to keep those questions separate long enough to answer them.
There is a strange expectation in some arguments about journalism that fairness should leave every participant approximately equally satisfied. But an interview is not a seating arrangement. You cannot establish its integrity by checking that everyone has been made equally comfortable. An official can receive ample opportunity to explain a policy and still emerge looking evasive. A report can be scrupulous and produce conclusions that are politically inconvenient.
We wanted to see that kind of work from CBS. Sunday gave us reason to keep watching. It did not give us enough information to declare a change of course, or to invent a heroic account of how this particular segment reached the screen. We do not know what happened in the editorial discussions. Pretending otherwise would turn our suspicion of management into a reporting method.
And saying Weiss has already dismantled 60 Minutes goes further than the evidence in front of us. The journalists are still there. The work is still happening. Describing the institution as finished can inadvertently help erase the people whose continued presence makes it worth fighting over.
But neither should their work become an automatic defense of the people above them.
This is one of the more convenient arrangements available to a media executive: the newsroom’s credibility can be presented as evidence of your leadership, while its objections can be dismissed as resistance to it. The reporters do the reporting. Management gets to explain what their reporting proves about management.
For viewers, the result is an exhausting second assignment. Alongside the subject of a broadcast, we are now studying its permission structure. We watch an interview about government pressure and wonder about corporate pressure. We hear a necessary question and mentally congratulate someone for being allowed to ask it.
That was part of our experience watching this report, and we resent having to spend any of our attention on it. There were election officials describing the conditions under which they are expected to do their jobs. We had enough to think about without also wondering about Lesley Stahl’s.
