4 hours ago
15
CBS News has hired the prominent British broadcaster Trevor Phillips as its senior global affairs correspondent in a significant hire for embattled top editor Bari Weiss.
The network said that reporting by Phillips, who currently presents the flagship Sunday political show on Sky News in the UK, would appear “on all CBS News programs and platforms”.
He will be joining a network that has been the subject of intense scrutiny over its politics and direction under Weiss, who was appointed after its parent company, Paramount Global, merged with Skydance Media, a company founded by David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Larry Ellison.
The network announced the appointment after CBS and Phillips were approached for comment by the Guardian. The appointment was first reported by Breaker.
While prominent in the UK, Phillips is not a household name in the US.
After beginning his career in the media, Phillips entered the political fray. He rose to prominence as the head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003, appointed to the role by the then prime minister, Tony Blair. He chaired its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, from 2007 to 2012, and was knighted in 2022 for his work on equality and human rights.
Prior to hosting Sky News’s Sunday morning show, he presented the network’s Sunday politics show. Phillips is the chair of the global freedom of expression campaign Index on Censorship and a senior fellow at the right-leaning thinktank Policy Exchange.
In 2020, Phillips revealed he had been suspended from the Labour party over alleged Islamophobia. His suspension letter, a copy of which was released by Phillips, cited previous statements including his reference to UK Muslims as “a nation within a nation” and comments observing how few people wore Remembrance Day poppies.
He was readmitted to the party the following year.
He is also a regular columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, where he has written about Donald Trump and his personal connection with the US.
“I accept that I am biased in all this,” he wrote recently. “I am the son of immigrants, twice over, first to London and then to New York. I come from a tribe that has prospered mightily from its life in America. This is a society that rewards ambition and hard work.”
Weiss said Phillips “cuts through the noise”. “His decades-long career is a masterclass in seeing beyond groupthink and pursuing the truth,” she said. “Trevor’s deep knowledge of geopolitics and history will be an incredible asset at CBS News, where he’ll quickly become an indispensable voice for audiences across all platforms.”
Phillips said: “CBS News is a global leader in making sense of events around the world for Americans. I’m honored to be joining such a storied institution with a mandate to bring impartial reporting, analysis and journalism to audiences that increasingly need to understand how global affairs impact their daily lives.”
CBS News’s London newsroom recently lost the highly respected bureau chief Claire Day. (The Wall Street Journal veteran Shayndi Raice was brought on to oversee foreign coverage for CBS News.)
CBS News has been most recently in the news for what veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley called “Black Thursday”, the 28 May gutting of the senior leadership and a significant chunk of the correspondent corps of the network’s most prominent and successful news program.
Pelley was fired a few days later “for cause”, after clashing with the show’s newly hired executive producer, Nick Bilton.
The network has undergone two rounds of layoffs during Weiss’s tenure, which began in October, creating a need to replenish its news operation.
