Welcome everybody to Crystal Cuyahuan friends.

Today we're joined by Will Somer.

Will, thanks for joining us, man.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So, Will is, of course, a reporter at the Bullwark, and he has an awesome substack called False Flag,

and he is an expert in all things right wing, particularly when it comes to the punditry.

Very interesting field that you've chosen to focus on here.

Indeed.

A lot of good characters.

Totally.

So there's a lot to talk about, but I think probably the best thing to bring up right off the bat here is the massive blowup that just happened over at 60 minutes, where Scott Pelley, the legendary reporter over there, he basically had enough.

He felt like, you know, Barry Weiss and the Ellison's and, you know, new management over there.

They sort of destroyed 60 minutes, destroyed CBS, made it so they don't have journalistic integrity anymore. They interject themselves into stories. He quite literally said they wanted him to promote falsehoods. And so he seemingly, you know, had some integrity and stood up and said, you know what, we're not doing this anymore. And now it appears like there might even be a legal battle that comes about as a result of this. What insight do you have on this for us? Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is a situation where Barry Weiss was really brought in. You know, they won't say this explicitly, but I think it's clear. She's supposed to rain in 60 minutes and the rest of CBS News make it so Donald Trump isn't mad at him, excuse me, mad at them, that he'll let the Paramount Warner Brothers merger go through. So you see these situations. I mean, I think Barry Weiss's defenders would say, well, you know, like the media's in trouble. You got to, you know, even you got to take drastic action. And if Scott Pelley can't handle that, whatever. But the reality is 60 Minutes is an incredibly successful show. I think it's bringing in like $200 million a year for CBS. And so I think a lot of these things like firing the top producers, firing other correspondents like Sharon Alfonzi, that's really kind of a cover for sort of changing the political makeup of the show, which was not some liberal show to begin with, but really sort of putting it in a way that is not going to offend Trump.

What can we say about what changes have been made, like what have been the impacts on the reporting

and the quality of the show at this point?

Yeah, well, you know, the most famous example would be sharing Alfonzi's story about

Seacop, the Salvadoran prison where the American migrants were sent. And the idea that this story was held, you know, having experienced myself at other outlets, there are ways to hold articles in ways that you're not saying, like, we can't say this because it's going to make the White House mad. But you can say in the case of Sikot, all of a sudden, very wife said,

at the last minute, I think it was like that day or that weekend, she said, you know what, I think this might need some more reporting. It needs, you know, potentially a comment from Stephen Miller or someone like that. And so that delays the story and drags it out. And ultimately it ran. But there are all these kind of internal roadblocks you can put up if you don't want a story that's going to be critical of the Trump administration to come out. Now, Scott Pelly,

Cecilia Vega, another correspondent who was fired and Sharon Alfonsie was fired, all said, you know, there were political machinations around our stories. They wanted us to introduce things that were, you know, maybe editorial and untrue, or they wanted us to be, the stories to be biased.

And we don't know all the details of what that looked like at this point, but it does seem pretty clear that Barry Weiss and her, sort of her new 60 Minutes Chief, Nick Bilton, are sort of being accused of skewing the stories here.

Have we ever seen an assault on a free press this severe?

Because Trump has basically, on a number of different occasions,gged that like, well, new management is doing his bidding. He actually threatened

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