On Wednesday night, just one day after an explosive all-hands meeting that reverberated across CBS News and the larger media industry, staffers on the network's foreign desk gathered at a pier along London's Thames River for a boat cruise. The three-hour excursion had been scheduled some time ago, I’m told, intended as a team-building activity for the journalists who make up the London bureau. Suffice to say, when the outing was initially planned, no one had anticipated that it would take place in the immediate aftermath of a shocking staff meeting that would spark backlash against the network's newish foreign chief, Shayndi Raice.
Raice, of course, was handpicked by Bari Weiss for the job—a position that opened after Weiss ousted her predecessor, Claire Day, following friction over editorial matters related to Israel, as Status previously reported. Raice arrived at CBS News under already suspicious circumstances, and the hope had surely been that an evening on the Thames might help her establish some much-needed rapport with the journalists she now leads.
Unfortunately for Raice, what had originally been conceived as a team-building exercise had, over the preceding 24 hours, morphed into something more akin to a team-saving exercise…
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