Wendy McMahon, a former senior exec at CBS who oversaw its news division during a legal clash with Donald Trump, believes “the truth is fighting for its life right now.”
The exec shared that view, attaching the caveat that she wasn’t intending it to be alarmist, during a wide-ranging discussion at NATPE Global in Miami. McMahon is one of a handful of recipients of this year’s NATPE Honors, which will be handed out Thursday. She took part Wednesday in a session moderated by David Begnaud, a former CBS News correspondent who is now a contributor and founder of Do Good Media, a venture launched with the backing of McMahon and CBS.
“I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that journalism, which is the essential guardrail of our democracy, is under siege right now,” McMahon said. “Day after day, we are seeing actions taken, decisions taken, that ultimately are dismantling the purpose of journalism and the protections that sustain it.”
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The conversation never made explicit mention of Trump, his administration, or Bari Weiss, who took over last year as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The Free Press, a digital outlet founded by Weiss, was acquired by Paramount before it closed its long-gestating merger with Skydance.
Paramount paid a $16 million settlement to Trump last summer to resolve the complaint, which stemmed from objections to the editing and promotion of a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris. CBS did not apologize or admit fault as part of the settlement.
McMahon exited CBS last May, a couple of months before the settlement. In her farewell memo to staffers, she said she and top management could not “agree on a path forward” given the company’s willingness to pay a settlement in a case universally considered to be without legal merit.
‘Asked by Deadline after the panel about her opinion of the vision recently laid out by Weiss for revitalizing CBS News, McMahon replied, “She’s the editor-in-chief. So, she is driving her editorial vision forward. And my hope, and where my heart will always lie, is with the journalists and the journalism of CBS News. And so, I’m just incredibly supportive of their ability, meaning the journalists of CBS News, to continue doing great work. Because that, to me, is what cannot be lost.”
Asked about the objections by 60 Minutes correspondents Sharon Alfonsi and Scott Pelley as well as other staffers to the abrupt shelving of a segment by Weiss, McMahon said, “I’ve never met a journalist who’s not gonna fight for their story. And, you know, the 60 Minutes team is that, plus, because they spend so long working on any one’s story. Yeah. And so the fact that so much of that, I guess, bleeds out into the public, is the unfortunate piece. I believe that, regardless. I do. You know, but having disagreements between a journalist and an editor-in-chief, that’s par for the course.”
In the chat with Begnaud, McMahon decried the layoffs at the Washington Post, which were announced earlier Wednesday. She also lamented the lapses of many news organizations over the past decade, during the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement.
At CBS, in her role overseeing both local and national news (as well as syndication arm CBS Ventures), McMahon said she sought to ensure that “we were reflecting the society we live in versus the society that we ultimately work in. … I think we missed things, right? We missed the 2016 election. We didn’t understand where the country was.”
Too often, McMahon said, legacy news organizations suffer from “the inability to accept something new, because you are concerned that in the race to modernize, you’re somehow going to lose your journalistic principles. That’s a defense and a rationale that is often an obstacle to really driving experimentation.”
AI is the next challenge in that vein for newsrooms, McMahon said. Begnaud asked, “Would you allow AI to be used to write scripts and anchor AI anchors to anchor the news?” McMahon didn’t hesitate. “No,” she said. “I’m not there.” For now, she added, AI is best seen as “an effective research tool.”