The veteran British broadcaster Sir Trevor Phillips had some strong words of advice for his CBS News colleagues when facing off against critics who question the editorial integrity of the network: “Why don’t you just fuck off and let us do our jobs?”

Phillips made his blunt suggestion during a contentious meeting of the network’s London bureau on Tuesday, during which the foreign editor, Shayndi Raice, went on a lengthy tirade criticizing unnamed staffers for suggesting that editorial oversight amounted to “interference” and informing colleagues that disobeying editors would be insubordination and “legal grounds for firing”.

Phillips’s decision to join CBS was announced in June. It came after its billionaire owner, David Ellison, installed the opinion journalist and broadcast newcomer Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in a move that shook staff.

The Guardian, which first reported the Tuesday meeting, reviewed an audio recording of the contentious session that rattled staffers. A CBS News spokesperson and Phillips declined to comment on the meeting.

Phillips spoke up initially to defend Raice, saying that the message she was delivering was common sense. “I’m genuinely surprised that you had to say anything that you just said in the last 15 minutes,” he said during the meeting. “It just seems to be axiomatic in any organization … I did want to say that I’m kind of surprised that in an organization of this vintage and capability, with the clever people I’ve met around here, that any of this actually has to be said.”

He then turned to outside opinion about CBS, telling colleagues that he faced criticism after it was announced he was leaving his perch at Sky News to serve as the network’s senior global affairs correspondent. Phillips is also a contributor to CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes, and voiced a short piece on Sunday on protests in Europe. Since CBS parent Paramount Global was acquired by Ellison’s Skydance Media in the summer of 2025, the company’s leadership has faced accusations of tilting the editorial scales in a more conservative-friendly direction.

“I could spend the next hour telling you the number of people when it was announced that I was coming here, the number of people who told me for all of the reasons you just explained, why this is the end of my career and how I was going to destroy everything that I’ve ever created, and all of that bollocks,” Phillips said.

He continued: “I think we’re in a new game now, actually, where we are now players as journalists. And what people are constantly trying to do is to knock us off – to frighten us, essentially, into doing this or doing that. It puts a premium on two things – one is our objectivity, and two: having each other’s backs. I think the worst thing that can happen now is if we start to go about telling people, ‘Well, I would have done this if the higher-ups hadn’t told me to do that.’ That’s exactly what everybody wants us to get into the game of. That’s how we become vulnerable. That’s how we start adjusting our copy according to somebody else’s lines outside of here … I think what you said is really, really important, but it points me in the direction of us having the mentality – forgive my French here – of telling everybody, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and let us do our jobs?’”