Fired 60 Minutes reporter Cecilia Vega has detailed some of the multiple times she says the new MAGA-friendly bosses at CBS News attempted to interfere in the flagship news show.
Vega, 49, became the first Latina correspondent for the once-prestigious newsmagazine when she was hired in January 2023. She released a take-no-prisoners letter in May confirming she had been “fired” ahead of her contract ending in March next year.
“I very much fear what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast,” Vega said in a statement posted to her Instagram, captioned, in Spanish, “La lucha sigue”—or “The fight goes on.”
Vega’s fight against a perceived new political agenda at CBS went on when she unleashed on the network’s new regime at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo in New Orleans on Thursday.
As reported by Status, the journalist, who previously served as ABC’s Chief White House correspondent for over a decade, cited three specific instances where she said management attempted to interfere with her 60 Minutes stories.
One instance came in a report following the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers during ICE protests in Minnesota in January.
Vega said she was encouraged to include footage of protesters violently attacking people in the streets, who the demonstrators believed were plain-clothed ICE officers.
However, Vega said her team could find “no credible examples” of any activity of that nature happening at the time.
Similarly, she was requested to include a supposed quote from the city’s Democratic mayor Jacob Frey, who has been outspoken about President Donald Trump and ICE, saying he wanted local police to fight ICE agents in the streets, prompting the city’s police chief to roll his eyes.
Vega said on Thursday while her team scoured every frame of video from the press conference, they never found such a moment, and thus labeled it “misinformation.”
“That never happened,” she said. “We could not find any instance of the mayor saying something like that.”
Brian O’Hara, the city’s police chief at the time, retired in May, rather than facing disciplinary action for interfering with an investigation into his conduct.
Vega also revealed she was told to introduce a story on Trump’s war on Iran, which was to air three weeks into the conflict, by saying, “Who is winning the war? Iran is totally outgunned by the United States and Israel.”
The journalist called the suggested introduction to her story an “administration talking point” by the White House, to infer the U.S. was winning the war, which is still ongoing, with the casualties increasing.
Her final example of interference came on a story about cuts to SNAP benefits being filmed in West Virginia, which she decided to tell “through the voices of strictly residents,” and bypassing speaking to politicians or experts.
Vega said she was asked why she had not interviewed Vice President JD Vance or spoken to an expert about his memoir Hillbilly Elegy for the piece, before pointing out Vance’s book was released in 2016, a full decade before the story she was covered, and that the memoir detailed his upbringing in Ohio, not West Virginia.
When asked on Thursday if the attempted “meddling” into her stories changed the finished output, Vega said, “If you watch my pieces, you’d see those examples did not make them in,” provoking loud applause from the audience.
While Vega was directly asked who was instigating the “meddling,” she did not name the network’s new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, but said it was the “new administration at CBS News.”
Vega noted that things “started to change when new people started showing up in the screenings and giving their feedback on pieces,” and strongly suggested she believed that Weiss was driving the requests to change 60 Minutes content.
Weiss was behind a decision last year to pull an episode of 60 Minutes covering a notorious El Salvador megaprison just hours before it was due to air.
Vega described 60 Minutes as previously having been an “island” with a “moat of protection around it.”
She confessed she realized the Weiss-led management team were not happy with her early on, saying there was a “real tension” in screenings of episodes before they went to air “that made me nervous.”
The journalist added that she could “get a sense” that “they were not liking this back-and-forth” over the content of her stories. Vega also stated that she “never had an opportunity to sit down with Bari Weiss one on one.”
“I don’t know why I was fired,” Vega said. “It’s been about three months now... and I don’t know. I was not given a reason. I still have not been given a reason.”
Vega told the audience that while she had clashed with editors in the past, her experience at 60 Minutes this year was different.
“Never in my career until now have I felt that those edits, those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics,” Vega said. “That’s the difference.”
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS for comment.
As part of her May statement after being fired, Vega referenced the new regime at CBS, under parent company Paramount Skydance, interfering in the show’s journalism, for fear of alienating the Trump administration, which signed off on the media merger last year.
“In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” Vega said.
“Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Veteran 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley was fired in June after a blow-up with CBS management.
He accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes and claimed she had been brought in to dismantle it.
The new-look 60 Minutes will return to CBS on September 20.
