In her first public comments since being fired this spring from 60 Minutes — which is considered a dream job for many TV news journalists — Cecilia Vega says that the new management at CBS News under Bari Weiss engaged in some very shady pressure campaigns to slant the news toward Trump-world talking points.

We learned in late May that former Chronicle and ABC 7 reporter Cecilia Vega had been let go from 60 Minutes, just three years after she had been hired there as the venerable news magazine's first Latinx correspondent. Vega was not the only correspondent fired, and there seemed to be an effort afoot at the end of the show's 58th season to clean house and reset the tone, under new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.

Alongside Vega, in May, management also fired correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, along with senior executive producers Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich.

The shakeup led to some low morale at 60 Minutes, and when veteran journalist Scott Pelley decided he was the only one with the seniority and job security to speak up in a meeting, he did, and he was subsequently fired in June. Pelley later told the New York Times that he was shocked by his own firing, but also that of Simon, who was highly respected by the staff — and for seemingly zero cause, except, perhaps, for some pushback over stories that aired about the fatal shootings of two civilians by ICE agents in Minneapolis, and the rising tensions there this past winter.

And Pelley's most pointed comments were about Simon's replacement, Nick Bilton, whom he described as having "slender" qualifications for the job, with little to no experience in TV news in particular. But he also had plenty to say about Weiss, and how she attempted to meddle, hours after a strict deadline, in how they reported on the events in Minneapolis and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Vega spoke on Thursday on stage in New Orleans at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo, as Status was first to report, in conversation with her former ABC News colleague John Quiñones.

Vega said she bad been scared to speak out in the last two months, but she said, "It's not that I just lost a job. There is a lot at stake. Sometimes you got to be scared and do it still."

Vega said that while she was never asked directly by Bari Weiss herself to alter any stories, the directives came from new management who worked under her.

The Chronicle picks up details from the Status piece, which transcribed an audio recording of Vega's on-stage comments, in which she claimed to have been directed to find evidence of events that did not take place.

In one instance, Vega said she was asked to include footage of protesters in Minneapolis attacking people they believed were undercover ICE agents, but she said her team could find no credible evidence that this took place.

In another instance, Vega reportedly said she was told to report that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had directed his chief of police to have officers directly confront ICE agents, but Vega could not find any public comments to this effect.

"That never happened,” Vega said, speaking to Quiñones this week.

Vega's story lines up with Pelley's, and Pelley said that he had learned of an email sent from Weiss to the former producer, Tanya Simon, that sounded distinctly like meddling with the aim of placating the Trump administration — namely, with directives like "make the protesters look more aggressive."

Weiss, who is married to former San Francisco writer Nellie Bowles — who took a rightward turn herself, thanks to Weiss, and wrote a 2022 piece for the Atlantic about how liberals destroyed her beloved San Francisco — founded the Free Press with Bowles in 2021 as a Substack newsletter, first calling it "Common Sense" in an unearned nod to Thomas Paine. The newsletter launched a year after Weiss had resigned as an opinion columnist for the New York Times, writing a scathing resignation letter that she still proudly broadcasts on her personal website, in which she attacked the woke demagogy at the Times, and saying the "paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people."

For the most part, Weiss seemed angry that too many of her liberal former colleagues were cowed by the woke mob on Twitter, that not enough of them supported Israel, or her criticisms of the DEI movement.

There were enough people with money who liked Weiss's take on things, and The Free Press gained millions in investments, growing steadily until 2025, when she took the meteoric leap to leading CBS News — after CBS, under Paramount owner David Ellison, had acquired The Free Press.

As the Nation notes, under Weiss, CBS News has appeared to swing in the direction of conservative speak, changing things in the style guide like "assigned sex at birth" to "biological sex at birth," and giving airtime to Charlie Kirk's clearly self-serving widow Erika. This is not an attempt at balancing two sides of the political spectrum for a centrist view so much as it is sticking a middle finger up at the Left and saying "it's our turn now to control the narrative," at least at CBS.

And none of this seems to be helping CBS's bottom line, though the billionaire Ellisons likely don't care that much. As the Daily Beast reported this week, CBS Mornings appears to have taken a hit in the ratings in the last month or two, losing ground to Today, Good Morning America, and Fox & Friends.

For her part, Vega told the audience in New Orleans on Thursday that she plans to "stay on the sidelines" for a bit and wait for new opportunities to crop up.

Previously: It Will Always Be More Profitable/Clickable to Shit On San Francisco, So People Will Always Do It

Top image: Cecilia Vega, Scott Pelley attends the CBS Fall Schedule Celebration at Paramount Studios on May 02, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/WireImage)