On Deadline: White House Angelo Carusone discusses how Bari Weiss's attempt to course correct is not going to “fix” CBS
Carusone: “It was a bang-and-slam operation, and that's going to make it really hard to not just maintain your audience and that credibility, but also to do the kind of recruiting that you need”
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From the July 28, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline White House
NICOLE WALLACE (HOST): This is based on an audio recording of Cecilia Vega said on stage when being interviewed by ABC's John Quiñones. She said, quote, she was encouraged to include footage of protesters violently attacking people in the streets in the demonstrators believed to be ICE officers in plain clothes. But Vega said her team could, quote, find no credible examples of such behavior at the time. On a separate piece about Donald Trump's Iran war just three weeks into the conflict, Vega said she was told to introduce the story by saying, quote, who's winning the war? Iran is totally outgunned by the United States and Israel. Vega called it an administration talking point used by the White House.
I mean it is, Angelo, it is an inside look at the sausage making of propaganda, and it says something that people said yes after these stories were made public.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I mean, in the early days of Fox and for a long time, right, they kept up a veneer of fair and balanced. I mean, they just kept hammering that away. They wanted to have a little bit of separation. You didn't want to seem like you were actively in cahoots with the administration. And yet that's the selling point of what Bari is doing over there is that they're not just going to fix the network or shift it, that they're actively going to participate and work with the administration. And these are examples of them actively trying to push the narrative that the administration is telling, just like we see, as has been reported, you know, Nick, the EP, going to the White House and sort of engaging in these meetings, that's why you can get Pete Hegseth to get up there and say it's very exciting when the elephants finally take over CNN, because they're in cahoots.
And this is, again to what you were talking about before, why people don't want to work there if you have a reputation, because you're not just thinking about your future professional growth. I mean, the word there is profession. Journalist is our professions. There are standards, practices, things that you have to adhere to and align with. And what you see in these instructions, these dictates are completely antithetical. They're opposite of what the profession would call for. They're political, they're political messaging, political communications, and that's OK, but you can't expect a journalist to sort of continue to keep up the veneer of being a journalist and yet participate in a campaign or a political operation. And that's what she is rapidly turning CBS into in a way that wasn't done, to even do it slowly or softly, to try to convince people to go along with her. It was a bang-and-slam operation, and that's going to make it really hard to not just maintain your audience and that credibility, but also to do the kind of recruiting that you need.
And those aren't the only examples. There's tons of them. It's not just, you know, Vega's point. It's what we heard time and again from people that were leaving. They were all having similar experiences. It's policy there.