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Which is worse, her political malevolence or her incompetence?

After CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was fired by Bari Weiss’s incompetent henchman Nick Bilton last week, the network veteran went public with his complaints about Weiss’s politically motivated mismanagement of the show. One of his most noteworthy complaints was that she pushed the correspondents to add distortions and lies to some of their segments. Media critics asked that Pelley be more specific, and on Sunday, with The New York Times, he was.

Most outrageously, he told Lulu Garcia-Navarro that for a February segment on the ICE siege of Minneapolis, four hours after the show’s final deadline, Weiss asked him to make the protesters look more violent, and add that the martyr Renée Good, mother and poet, was driving toward her murderer (even though multiple forensic video examinations, including by CBS, concluded that she had already turned the car away from him when he shot her in the head). Pelley refused, and the segment ran as it had been produced. He never heard back from Weiss about it.

“There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News,” he added.

I’m as big a fan of Pelley’s bravery in confronting Weiss and Bilton as any journalist with integrity, but I have to point out, with respect, that Pelley had already bent over backward to present “both sides” of ICE’s deadly siege of the city. In the interview with Garcia-Navarro, he exaggerated the violence of the protesters, saying they accounted for “half” of the “confrontations” that rocked Operation Metro Surge:

I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did…. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes.

I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters........

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