Mary Walsh, a veteran CBS News producer of over four decades, is exiting the company, claiming in an exit memo to staffers that instructions to “aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum” are partly why she’s departing.
“We’ve been reading a lot of goodbyes lately and here I am headed out the door. It’s too soon, even after 46 years,” Mary Walsh wrote in a memo sent Friday, per The Guardian. “But maybe it’s for the best. We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don’t know how to do that.”
The Guardian further reported that CBS Evening News executive editor Kim Harvey sent a separate message to staff in response to Walsh’s memo.
“We wish Mary Walsh well and thank her for many years of service,” Harvey wrote, according to the outlet. “Mary wrote in her farewell note, ‘We’ve been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum.’ That is simply not true. Here at the Evening News, we value our editorial independence, and CBS News leadership has never asked us to aim our reporting in any political direction.”
Walsh joined CBS News in September 1982, per her LinkedIn. Her departure arrives one day after Netflix backed out of the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, that was ultimately won by Paramount. The latter company is led by David Ellison, and has been going through changes with Bari Weiss as CBS News’ editor-in-chief.
Several CBS Evening News production staffers have taken buyouts, as the program shifts with Tony Dokoupil at the forefront. As The Hollywood Reporter previously reported on Feb. 12, 11 staffers took the buyout offer, including producer Alicia Hastey, who wrote in a departing note that she was “proud of the work that’s been done in my time here.”
However, she added that “there has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism.”
“The truth is that commitment to those people [in the stories Hastey cited] and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible,” Hastey continued. “Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
