On Monday, less than 24 hours after Bari Weiss made her now-infamous decision to postpone a 60 Minutes segment about a Salvadoran prison and ignited a Kimmel-level national freakout over the storied newsmagazine’s perceived capitulation to Trump, the show’s correspondents and producers convened for a weekly meeting. By then, battle lines had been drawn: Sharyn Alfonsi, the 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, had accused Bari of pulling it for political reasons—a charge reinforced by Larry Ellison’s subsequent $40 billion pledge to backstop his son David’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which will require regulatory approval. Trump has publicly chastised 60 Minutes—most recently for its interview with his new critic, Marjorie Taylor Greene—and it wasn’t hard to imagine that the Ellisons didn’t want the show further inserting itself into the deal calculus. (For the record: No one’s offered actual proof that the Ellisons put a finger on the scale to pull Alfonsi’s story.)

Meanwhile, Bari maintained that the segment simply needed more reporting, an on-the-record response from the administration, and something to advance a story that had already been covered by the Times and others. Was this a genuine effort to raise the standards of 60 Minutes reportage, a feeble attempt to gaslight her way out of controversy, or both? In one of many memos this week, Bari argued that holding the piece was essential to CBS’s efforts to “win back” the trust of the American people. Needless to say, it had the opposite effect.

While critics debated the merits and poked holes in Bari’s defense—yes, the segment had been fully vetted by lawyers and fact-checkers, and, yes, Sharyn had sought comment from the necessary representatives, and yes, Bari missed a number of opportunities to view the segment in the week prior to the broadcast—veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley offered his colleagues a far more trenchant diagnosis of the problem at the Monday afternoon edit meeting: Bari wasn’t doing the work. “She needs to take her job a little more seriously,” Pelley told them. “It’s not a part-time job.”

Bari’s inexperience in television and lack of administrative finesse have always been looming vulnerabilities. Even before David Ellison formally offered her the job, former Free Press employees and friends and sponsors in the Hollywood mogul class warned that she faced a steep learning curve in television, and that those challenges would be exacerbated by her scattered leadership style. “She can’t even manage her own calendar,” one media executive told me.

The 60 Minutes scandal has further exposed those vulnerabilities. Bari did not review it herself until late Thursday evening—less than 18 hours before CBS began promoting the segment. Meanwhile, her notes to the producers failed to appreciate that television segments aren’t as easily augmented as Substack posts. By the time Bari made the decision to scrap the story over the weekend, it was already too late: The story was being promoted, and the ensuing controversy was unavoidable in light of the broader political climate in which the Ellisons had been advertising their rapport with the White House.

But Pelley’s critique also hinted at a deeper frustration with the front office. While Bari has tried to make her mark on the network by chasing big hires and big bookings, she has done little to establish relationships with many of the network’s own producers and talent. In her first three months, I’m told, she has had little to no communication with Pelley, Alfonsi, and several other 60 Minutes correspondents. (No wonder Scott is pissed…) In one memo this week, Bari stressed that she wanted the newsroom to be “able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters with respect.” In postponing the segment, however, she never reached out to Alfonsi or responded to her entreaties. A hard private conversation might not have settled this matter indefinitely, but it sure would have led to a less toxic result.

It’s tempting to view Bari’s tenure at CBS News through the prism of politics. In fact, she’s on quite comfortable terrain in that regard—happy to wage fights like these in public, where debating the use of the term “migrants” and insisting on a balancing interview becomes a symbolic act. But the deeper issue is cultural: The episode is a reminder that Bari is subject to the same mundane demands of management that plagued her recent predecessors in the trade, from Chris Licht at CNN to Kim Godwin at ABC. And while she may be smarter than her contemporaries and have a more ambitious vision, she won’t achieve any of her goals without gaining some fluency in the finer points of the medium, including the avoidance of unforced P.R. errors. After all, her biggest challenge isn’t simply that she must reimagine CBS News—rather, she needs to do so, at least at first, with the same people who had been guiding it into its current malaise.

In the meantime, the drama has exposed the familiar adversarial dynamic between newsroom veterans and new leaders who haven’t yet figured out how to lead. As readers of this email know, that is a relationship marked by mutual suspicion and thinly veiled resentment—an undercurrent that, once surfaced, is difficult to contain. It sure seems like we’re approaching a workplace in which Bari’s colleagues at 60 Minutes will be tempted to continually test her limits and the patience of her overlords. Remember that David Ellison is sorta new at this media mogul game, too.