CBS News Producer Mocked for Dramatic Resignation Note Claiming It’s Now ‘Impossible’ To Cover ‘Underrepresented Perspectives’

A now-former producer of the “CBS Evening News,” Alicia Hastey, is facing mockery after she quit her job, saying it is almost “impossible” to highlight “underrepresented perspectives” under the new management. The departure comes as executives from CBS News’s new corporate parent, Skydance Media, have pledged to address allegations of a left-wing bias at the Tiffany Network and committed to fair journalism. The chief executive of Skydance, David Ellison, told reporters in August that he wants to make the network into one that Democrats and Republicans feel they can watch. Skydance executives also promised to eliminate CBS Inc.’s unusually aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which involved racial quotas for writers’ rooms and at CBS and hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked to buy shows from black producers.As part of the effort to clean up CBS News, its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has engaged in a hands-on effort to revamp the “Evening News.”The new format launched earlier this year, and the show’s new host, Tony Dokoupil, said the program would focus less on the “perspective of advocates” and more on those of the “average American.”The changes have rankled the reliably liberal producers at CBS News. In her resignation note, Ms. Hastey said it has become almost “impossible” to cover stories that highlight “underrepresented perspectives,” a term that is frequently used in left-wing stories about people of color or the LGBTQ community. In the letter to her colleagues on Wednesday, Ms. Hastey said she is “proud” of her work at the network that “aimed to foreground underrepresented perspectives, interviews that challenged conventional wisdom, and efforts to make our journalism more responsive to a skeptical public.”She highlighted a story about a “widow paying off her farm debt with wind turbines on her land,” and stories about “numerous communities buoyed by love, kindness, and care for humanity.”(President Trump is a fierce opponent of windmills.) “But, there has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism. The truth is that commitment to those people and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible,” Ms. Hastey said. “Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”She stressed that “none of this detracts from the talent of the journalists who remain at CBS News.”Her memo received mockery from conservative commentators who noted it appeared to be an admission that under the previous management, there were “ideological expectations” for stories, just ones that she agreed with. A conservative journalist, Jonah Goldberg, asked on X, “So is the problem ideological expectations or the shifting of them?”A senior writer at RealClearPolitics, Mark Hemingway, wrote, “Stories are ‘evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations’? Pretty sure this was ALWAYS happening, it’s just that this entitled producer wholly agreed with the previous set of ideological expectations, not Bari Weiss’.”“Hastey admits there were pre-existing ideological expectations. She doesn’t like that they shifted. Fascinating,” said conservative radio host Erick Erickson. A senior writer at National Review, Dan McLaughlin, said, “‘Shifting’ is doing all the work here.”While Ms. Hastey complained about the “shifting” ideological expectations, CBS has continued to air stories critical of Mr. Trump. And a former Trump ally turned MAGA critic, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was interviewed on “60 Minutes,” where she accused the president of inciting death threats against her family. Mr. Trump has also lashed out at the new owners of CBS for, in his view, not shifting the editorial stance of the network to the right. After the interview with Ms. Greene, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, “For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”Earlier this week, CBS published an article that sought to undercut the Trump Administration’s assertion that it is deporting the “worst of the worst.” It stated that less than 14 percent of the 400,000 illegal immigrants deported had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.The Department of Homeland Security pushed back against relying on that statistic, stating, “Drug trafficking, Distribution of child pornography, burglary, fraud, DUI, embezzlement, solicitation of a minor, human smuggling are all categorized as ‘nonviolent crimes.’’CBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

CBS News Producer Mocked for Dramatic Resignation Note Claiming It’s Now ‘Impossible’ To Cover ‘Underrepresented Perspectives’

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