stahl Leslie 60 min
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THE RESISTANCE ~ BARI?
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an 1026
A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.
Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.
Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.
"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."
She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.
Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.
After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.
The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.
"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.
Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.
But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.
This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.
Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.
"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."
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an 10 26
A senior CBS News editor can be heard threatening journalists that defying management could get them fired in newly released audio from a heated staff meeting, exposing an internal fight over the network's coverage of Israel and Gaza.
Shayndi Raice, the network's foreign editor and a hire of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, delivered the warning during a Tuesday meeting with foreign bureau staff that was leaked to media reporter Oliver Darcy and executive editor Jon Passantino on the Power Lines podcast.
"This is not your publishing platform," Raice told employees, insisting that decisions about what CBS publishes ultimately rest with her and other senior leaders.
"That is called insubordination! And it's legal grounds for firing," she said of refusing management directives in a long rant that went on for 15 minutes.
The leaked audio follows reports of disputes with two high-profile 60 Minutes segments involving Israeli settler violence by Lesley Stahl and a report by Holly Williams on the third anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas militants.
The issue was with Williams adding the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which was removed from the broadcast version.
Raice denied ordering the figure's removal and said she had wanted the Israeli death toll as well, wanting to distinguish the civilian casualties from combatants. She claimed that the additional info about the deaths made the report too complicated for the time reserved for the segment to air.
Williams pushed back during the meeting, saying the revisions were given to her without having a chance to discuss it.
"I was told that I had to make the changes as written, and that there was no negotiation," she said.
According to Status, Raice also told Williams she had gotten the story wrong, claiming she understood the subject better than the veteran correspondent.
Raice defended the authority of editors to reshape stories, arguing that challenging reporters and adding layers of review were essential parts of journalism. She pointed to her experience at The Wall Street Journal, which she described as “the best journalism.”
Darcy said he felt Raice's tone was condescending, adding that the veteran CBS journalists have already worked with producers, standards officials, and senior editors before their reports reach the air as standard procedure
Bari Weiss, who had no experience before heading CBS, has been a controversial addition to the newsroom, with this being just the latest in a string of controversies, with veterans on the network accusing her of bias.
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pete
...more Emmy awards and made more money than any other news program or prime-time program for that matter. Competitors, analyzing the show’s extraordinary profits, grasped (figuratively and literally) the enormous rewards available if the news altered its intellectual formats in pursuit of wider audiences. This insight launched the transformation of news divisions into major earners for their corporate parents.
The wealth and influence derived from that evolution did more to shape the nature of news and the underlying decisions concerning what was reported and how it was reported, than Lewis Powell could have foreseen or hoped. By the end of the 1970s, network news divisions were generating 60 percent of corporate profits. The news was now considered “too important to leave to journalists.” Corporate executives and accountants began devising changes to format, style, and presentation that would bring them numbers of viewers that would make them among the largest corporations on earth in terms of revenue, market capitalization and global influence.