Recently-appointed CBS News correspondent Trevor Phillips has given a typically forthright assessment of his new boss, Bari Weiss.
“Bari and her team have a huge tanker of a network news organisation to turn around, and they are assembling a little team on the bridge,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “The great thing about her is that she’s one of those people who will either change the world or crash and burn. But when they crash and burn, it’s in technicolour.”
Phillips, who has been a correspondent for the U.K.’s Sky News since 2021, was handpicked by CBS News editor-in-chief Weiss to join the Paramount-owned network as senior global affairs correspondent. He will also join “60 Minutes.” A veteran writer and broadcaster as well as a former politician, Phillips was previously chair of the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission and in 2022 was knighted for his services to equality and human rights .
He is set to move across the pond this summer to take up the new role at CBS. “You know, I’m 72. It’s a great adventure,” he said of Weiss’s offer. “And who turns down adventures if someone is willing to take a chance on you?”
To mark the move, Phillips gave a wide-ranging interview to the Telegraph, in which he gamely discussed some of the controversy that has swirled since Weiss was appointed to her role last year. “In the U.S., the controversy has been framed as, ‘CBS News is becoming anti-woke’. But that’s not what Bari is about,” Phillip said. “She has her own views, some of which I’m sympathetic to, some of which I’m not, but her point is that the media should be heterodox. There should be a variety of voices.”
He wouldn’t comment on rumors that reporter Holly Williams, who works in CBS News’ London bureau, had been taken off an interview with right wing politician Nigel Farage in favor of Phillips, but said: “What’s interesting in politics now is this current of thought, represented by Farage, Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen, which essentially says the way we have done conventional politics is bust in a new world, and we need to do things differently. We keep trying to fit it into the old Right/Left duopoly, and I don’t think that’s quite right. The interviews I’m interested in doing will include that group [of leaders].”
“I’m not the smoothest presenter on television or reader of the autocue, but I guess they think that I manage the chaos [of live guests] well,” Phillips added. “Broadcast journalism has, to some extent, become the creature of entertainment. We need to return to the business of reporting. To put it in its crassest terms, the story needs to come before the reporter. Too many people who do what I do put themselves between the viewer and the story, and that’s not our job.”