On the third anniversary of October 7, CBS News ran a piece by veteran correspondent Holly Williams on its evening newscast. Before it aired, the network’s new foreign editor rewrote parts of it and told Williams the changes weren’t up for discussion. The media newsletter Status reported on the edits. The foreign editor then called a meeting of the entire foreign staff, defended herself for about fifteen minutes, and told them that ignoring the chain of command “is called insubordination and it’s legal grounds for firing.” Somebody recorded it, and the audio leaked. Status played the tape on its podcast. Then Cenk Uygur got hold of it and announced that American media is “Israeli propaganda.”
I listened to all of it, then watched the three October 7 pieces CBS actually aired that day. What’s on the tape is not what anybody is selling. The editor made a defensible call and defended it badly. Status got a real scoop and then spun it. And Cenk did what Cenk does, which is take a newsroom argument about a two-minute TV package and turn it into a story about a global conspiracy, with a Medicare ad in the middle.
Who’s who
Shayndi Raice is the CBS News foreign editor, based in London. She came from The Wall Street Journal, where she was Middle East bureau chief, so she has actually covered this region for a living. She was hired under Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, who became editor-in-chief of CBS News after David Ellison’s Skydance acquired CBS’s parent company Paramount. David’s father is Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
Holly Williams is CBS’s senior foreign correspondent, an Australian who has been with the network since 2012 and has covered wars from Iraq to Ukraine.
Oliver Darcy used to run CNN’s media newsletter and now runs Status. He and his executive editor Jon Passantino host a podcast called Power Lines.
Cenk Uygur runs The Young Turks, an online progressive network. You may remember him from such hits as the flydubai false-flag thing earlier this month.
What CBS actually aired on October 7
Everybody is arguing about what CBS cut. Almost nobody bothered to look at what CBS ran. CBS ran three separate anniversary pieces that day, and you can watch all of them.
The morning piece (CBS Mornings, Holly Williams). The anchor intro gives both numbers back to back: Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage, and Israel’s offensive in Gaza killed more than 70,000 people “according to Gaza’s health ministry run by Hamas.” Williams’ package opens on the regional wars since October 7, then goes to the Bibas family. Kfir and Ariel’s aunt, Orly Bibas-Levy, talks about the reports that Netanyahu was warned before the attack, and Williams notes that he denies them. Bibas-Levy calls it “a knife in the heart.” Then a short section in Gaza with the grandmother of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old killed by Israeli fire in 2024, noting that the IDF opened a criminal investigation in August.
The streaming piece (CBS News 24/7, Elizabeth Cook). A straight timeline: about 1,200 killed on October 7, 251 hostages, nearly 500 Israeli soldiers killed in the war, more than 71,000 Palestinians dead, then Lebanon and Iran.
The evening piece (CBS Evening News, Holly Williams). This is the one Raice edited. The intro gives the Israeli toll and then pivots to Antisemitic attacks since: Temple Israel in Michigan, the couple murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. The package itself is about the Nova festival, where 378 people were killed and 44 taken hostage (the IDF’s revised count; you’ll still see the older figure of 364 around), and Moran Stela Yanai, one of the 44. Gaza appears once, as the airstrikes Yanai feared while she was held there. No Gaza death toll. No Palestinians. No Netanyahu.
| Mornings (Williams) | 24/7 (Cook) | Evening News (Williams) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Israeli toll | Yes | Yes, plus soldiers | Yes |
| Gaza toll | Yes, attributed to Hamas-run ministry | Yes | No |
| Palestinian voice | Yes | No | No |
| Netanyahu warning reports | Yes, with his denial | No | No |
One detail gives the edit away. Both Williams pieces end on the exact same line: the massacre “still casts a long shadow over not just Israel, but the entire Middle East.” In the morning version that line pays off two minutes about Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and an Israeli election. In the evening version it refers to a Middle East the piece never mentions. That’s what a script looks like after stuff has been taken out of it.
Shayndi Raice had a point
I want to be fair to Raice, because almost nobody else has been.
Her core argument in the meeting was this: on the anniversary of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, you can legitimately decide the main evening news piece is about the people who were murdered that day, and cover Gaza in other pieces. She said, correctly, that choosing to lead with the war is also an editorial opinion. Nobody who chooses the “context” version gets to pretend they’re the objective one.
That’s not a crazy position. It’s how most anniversary journalism works. On September 11 the networks read the names. The Iraq war shows up in the analysis pieces, not usually in the ninety seconds on the evening news. And the piece that aired is good television. Yanai walking the dance floor where her friends were killed is the kind of thing an anniversary piece should do. Nothing in it is false.
She also had a defensible standards argument on the Netanyahu story. Haaretz reported that UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed called Netanyahu roughly ten days before October 7 to warn him about Sinwar. Netanyahu’s office says that’s false and he’s suing. An unnamed UAE official denied it too. Raice told the staff CBS had never confirmed it independently and that the UAE had denied it, then corrected herself on the spot to say the denial wasn’t on the record. That’s accurate. Holding back on a single-source allegation the network hadn’t verified is a call plenty of standards editors would make.
And she wasn’t trying to keep Netanyahu out of the story. When Williams pointed out that the rewrite dropped his name entirely, Raice said she would have been fine with mentioning him, just not the allegations. Williams said she never got the chance to negotiate that, because the script came to her as a diktat. Raice shot back that Williams could have called her. That’s the whole mess right there. There was a version both of them could have lived with, and nobody had the conversation.
And her “he knew everything, they saw the SIM cards” rant contains a real argument a lot of Israelis make: the warning signs were everywhere, the failure was systemic, and one phone call doesn’t change who’s responsible.
Last thing in her favour. She’s new in the job (Status itself calls her “brand new”), she’d just been criticized in the press, and she called a meeting to defend herself the next day. That’s a bad instinct. It’s also a very human one.
Then she argued it terribly
The problem is that almost every specific defense she offered falls apart when you check it.
“Nowhere in that piece does it say how many Israelis were killed.” Technically true of Williams’ package. But the Gaza number wasn’t in the package either. Both numbers were in the anchor intro, side by side, with the Gaza figure attributed to the Hamas-run ministry. The balance she said was missing was right there.
“Too complicated.” She said if you include the Gaza toll you have to note combatants, and then Israeli soldiers, and it got too complicated. The CBS 24/7 piece did the Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian toll in one sentence on the same day. And “too complicated” ended with a piece that has no numbers at all.
“Magic number.” The Israeli military itself reportedly briefed Israeli journalists in January that about 70,000 Gazans were killed. You can argue about the civilian and combatant split, and the IDF says that’s still under review. Calling the total a “magic number” isn’t an argument.
“Nobody really cares.” She said she’d been in Israel for Sukkot, talked politics with friends the whole time, and nobody mentioned the warning reports. With respect: I live here. Responsibility for October 7 is one of the central fights in the October 27 election, and Netanyahu’s whole defense is that the security chiefs saw the signs and didn’t wake him. A direct warning to him personally goes straight at that defense. That’s why it matters, and why Bennett called ignoring it criminal negligence. Also, CBS’s own morning piece had a member of the Bibas family on camera saying exactly how much she cares.
Then there’s the management. Williams said in the meeting that she was told she had to make the changes as written and that there was no negotiation. Raice confirmed it: at that point, there was no negotiation. She told a correspondent with more than 25 years of covering wars and conflicts that she “got it wrong” because she doesn’t know the story as well as Raice does. She told CBS journalists the Wall Street Journal does the best journalism in America. She said she didn’t want to discuss the details of the October 7 piece publicly, then brought up the death toll herself, and when Williams pointed that out, launched into a full defense of the Netanyahu cut too. She ended an exchange with “whatever.” And she told the whole foreign desk that not listening is insubordination and grounds for firing.
That doesn’t make her a propagandist. She’s a smart, experienced reporter who is new at managing people and had a very bad morning. Her case was better than her arguments, and CBS’s own broadcasts show it.
Status got a scoop, then spun it
The Status reporting is real. The edits happened, the meeting happened, the tape is authentic, and nobody at CBS has said otherwise. Good get. Darcy and Passantino are also right that “nobody cares” is nonsense and that most outlets ran the Gaza toll.
But listen to how they talk about it, because it’s not reporting anymore.
Darcy admits they never saw the rough cut, then describes what it “apparently included” and builds the segment on that.
Their best comparison is 9/11, and it works against them. The anniversary stories, they say, all included the Iraq war. Anniversary analysis pieces did. The evening news packages mostly read the names. That’s Raice’s argument, not theirs.
They overstate the Israeli number. “Even the Israelis accept that number,” they say, as if the Israeli government had formally signed off. It was an anonymous briefing, and the IDF said publicly that the details didn’t reflect official data. It’s still a strong point against “magic number.” It’s not what they said it was.
A fair amount of it is guesswork presented as reporting. “This is coming from Barry Weiss.” “That’s my guess.” They say Raice’s predecessor as foreign editor was removed “because she did not align with her on Israel.” Maybe. They didn’t show it.
Then look at how they describe Raice herself. “Mom talking down to the kids.” “Emotionally triggered.” “Her emotion got the best of her.” Raice was rude and heavy-handed, and they can say so. I doubt they’d describe a male editor that way.
And they made it about Bari Weiss. Weiss isn’t on the tape. Raice is identified, over and over, as Weiss’s “handpicked” foreign editor, as if that were her job title, and the hosts guess that the edits were really Weiss’s. The rest of the coverage followed: the Daily Beast ran this story under “MAGA-Coded CBS” and its earlier one under “MAGA-Curious CBS Boss.” You can think Weiss is the wrong person to run CBS News. But when a fight between a foreign editor and a correspondent becomes a story about Weiss in every headline, the story has stopped being about what happened in the meeting.
Meanwhile they missed the most useful fact in the whole story. They pointed out that Gayle King attributed the Gaza number to the Hamas-run ministry. They never noticed that the same intro gave the Israeli toll, which answers Raice’s main defense. They were too busy with her tone to check her facts.
They even got the emphasis wrong. Status led with the Gaza death toll, and so did everyone who followed them. On the tape, Williams says her biggest concern about the dictated script wasn’t the death toll at all. It was losing the Netanyahu allegations, which is an Israeli political story, not a Gaza one.
The real story was right there: the same correspondent’s two pieces, side by side, on the same day. Status had it in hand and went for melodrama instead.
And then there’s Cenk
Status at least reported something. Cenk watched Status and did a show.
“Netanyahu knew about October 7th, which is 100% confirmed, including by Haaretz.” Haaretz is the outlet that made the allegation. A newspaper can’t confirm its own story by publishing it. Netanyahu denies it and is suing; a UAE official denies it; Bennett believes it; nobody has proven it. “100% confirmed” means Cenk read a headline he liked.
“Larry Ellison is the biggest charitable donor to the Israeli Defense Forces.” Ellison gave $16.6 million to Friends of the IDF in 2017, the largest single gift in that charity’s history, for wellbeing facilities on a training base. FIDF is a US charity, not the army, and Larry didn’t buy CBS, his son’s company did. Then: “He bought it so you wouldn’t criticize Israel.” And then, I swear to God, with no pause: “The Medicare annual enrollment period is here.” The man explains who really controls the news and goes straight into reading an ad. Media criticism, brought to you by Chapter.
“The IDF has already said, ‘Oh, yeah, we murdered at least 71,000 of them.'” The IDF said no such thing. An anonymous official estimated about 70,000 dead, not counting the missing. “Murdered” is Cenk’s word, and the quote marks are his invention.
“Normally you get 100% pro-Israel coverage.” This is a story about CBS airing, in a single day, a Gaza toll attributed to Hamas, a Palestinian grandmother saying she expects no justice from Israel, and the warning allegations against Netanyahu. The same week, 60 Minutes aired Lesley Stahl’s segment on settler violence. Meanwhile NewsBusters was calling the morning piece “vile” for being too sympathetic to Gaza. When the left calls you Israeli propaganda and the right calls you vile for both-sidesing October 7, on the same morning, maybe you’re just a news network.
Also, think it through for a second. In the same segment, Cenk says American media “normally” gives you “100% pro-Israel coverage” and that Larry Ellison bought CBS “so you wouldn’t criticize Israel.” If CBS was already 100% pro-Israel, Larry spent billions to buy something he already had. Either the media was a Zionist monolith before Ellison, or Ellison changed something. It can’t be both. And if Ellison changed something, then CBS wasn’t 100% anything before he showed up.
He also gets Raice wrong. Cenk says Raice was “demanding that they take a piece and make it more pro-Israel” and “only give a positive view of Israel.” On the tape, she says the morning piece with all the Gaza context was fine and she had no problem with it. The firing line was about chain of command. Rude, yes. “You’ll be fired for criticizing Israel,” no.
To be fair to Cenk, since I’m being fair to everybody, his October 7 numbers are close. AFP’s analysis of Israeli social security data counted 695 Israeli civilians, 71 foreigners and 373 security personnel, 1,139 in all. The trouble is what he does with them. He cites the soldiers so he can say it is “legal to fight back against a military occupation,” on the anniversary of a day when Hamas murdered about 760 civilians at a dance party and in their homes. He gets the numbers right, then uses them to argue October 7 was resistance.
He also spent a chunk of the segment telling a story about how MSNBC once asked him to be nicer to Washington. Which is, I suppose, the same thing as October 7.
The test
There’s a simple test for all of this. In 2014, Matti Friedman, who spent years as an AP reporter and editor in Jerusalem, wrote that his bureau’s editors routinely played up Israeli wrongdoing, went easy on Hamas, and kept stories that complicated the narrative off the wire. AP disputed his account. A lot of pro-Israel readers treated that essay as proof of media bias, and still do. Holly Williams is making essentially the same complaint from the other direction: true things her editors kept off the air. You don’t get to call one “interference” and the other “editing.” Editors get to decide what runs. The question is whether they decided well, and whether you’d say the same thing if the cut had gone against your side.
What should have aired
The frustrating part is that CBS already got this right, on the same day, with the same correspondent. Williams’ morning piece is victims-first. It has both tolls, properly attributed. It reports the warning allegations as allegations, with Netanyahu’s denial attached, through the eyes of a family that lost a mother and two little boys. It takes under three minutes.
That version is fair to the victims and it holds up when you check it. It also shows why the warnings question isn’t a sideshow. It’s exactly the kind of thing a real state commission of inquiry exists to settle, which is the only fair place for it, as opposed to Haaretz, the Prime Minister’s lawyers, or a guy reading a Medicare ad.
Jewlicious has opinions. So does everybody in this story. Having a view is fine. What I look for is whether a writer ever surprises me, whether they’ll admit the other side got something right or their own side screwed up. Raice, for all her faults, made an argument her critics won’t even acknowledge. Cenk has never surprised anyone in his life.
― Tom Robbins
