Yesterday the CBS program, 60 Minutes, was scheduled to include a story about CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador that the Trump administration has been sending Venezuelan migrants to — falsely claiming that all of them were violent criminals.
As NPR reported in “CBS news chief Bari Weiss pulls ’60 Minutes’ story, sparking outcry,” the story was kept off the air at the last moment even though it had been thoroughly reviewed and approved by CBS.
Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
Weiss told colleagues this weekend the piece — planned for Sunday night’s show — could not run without an on-the-record comment from an administration official. She pushed for 60 Minutes to interview Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Trump, or someone of his stature. That’s according to two people with knowledge of events at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing job security.
…The correspondent on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, condemned the decision in an email to 60 Minutes colleagues on Sunday evening, saying she believed it was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” (The email was obtained by NPR and other news organizations.)
…The story had undergone repeated formal reviews by senior producers and news executives, as well as people from the legal and standards division, according to the two people at CBS, echoing Alfonsi’s account.
Alfonsi wrote that she and her colleagues on the story had sought comments and interviews from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.
“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote in the email. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.” (Alfonsi did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
It seems clear that Weiss was trying to curry favor with the Trump administration by taking the CECOT story off the air.
Paramount owns CBS. Paramount seeks a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery after Warner announced a deal with Netflix. The Paramount proposal includes CNN, which Trump would dearly like to make into Fox News Lite. Larry Ellison is the controlling shareholder of Paramount. He is deeply conservative. Weiss was picked by him to lead CBS News even though she is unqualified for that job. The Trump administration could block the Warner deal with Netflix.
Thus it sure looks like Weiss was trying to avoid airing an embarrassing story for the Trump administration in order to benefit Parmount. Fortunately, the 60 Minutes story appeared on social media today after a Canadian outlet posted it online. I wasn’t able to find it on You Tube, but it appeared on my X timeline, having been shared by Blue Georgia.
I encourage you to watch the video by clicking on the previous link, or here. You may need to scroll up on X to see the two video posts, one with subtitles and one better quality video with no subtitles.
It’s obvious why Trump and his cronies don’t want people to see the video. It depicts men who were sent to the El Salvador prison talking about the horrible tortures they endured there. Most of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT weren’t criminals, their only “crime” being that they entered our country illegally. Just 3%, I recall, had a violent criminal history in either the United States or their country of origin.
What the Trump administration did was a crime against humanity. Thank you, 60 Minutes for reporting the story. And curse you, Bari Weiss, for trying to kill the story.
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