In a striking sign of unrest at one of America’s most storied newsrooms, a long time CBS Evening News producer delivered a blistering farewell to colleagues this week accusing the network of abandoning core journalistic values.
Alicia Hastey, a producer who spent four years with CBS, announced her departure after accepting a buyout, and used her exit note to sound the alarm. “It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am taking a buy out and today was my last day in the Broadcast Center,” she wrote, acknowledging both her pride in the stories she helped produce and the rising tensions she saw within the newsroom.
Hastey pointed to a “sweeping new vision” within the network that, she said, shifted away from traditional reporting norms toward what has been described by some insiders as “heterodox” journalism. That change, she said, has led to a newsroom culture where stories are increasingly evaluated not just on their merit but on whether they align with rapidly changing ideological expectations, fueling pressures to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
Highlighting grassroots community reporting and interviews that pushed against conventional wisdom, work she said once defined the best of broadcast journalism, Hastey lamented that such efforts have become harder to sustain. “The truth is that commitment to those people and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible,” she wrote.
While Hastey stopped short of naming leadership figures directly, the tone of her critique resonated across a newsroom already undergoing major changes. She emphasized the talented journalists who remain at CBS even as she warned that fear and uncertainty now overshadow the newsroom’s pursuit of truth.
