CBS in crisis after pulling a report on Trump’s deportations to El Salvador (which later leaked online)

The final blow to a decidedly unpleasant year for the press in the United States was a scandal over a decision by the new head of CBS News, the anti-woke columnist Bari Weiss, who was hired after U.S. President Donald Trump pressured the network. Weiss unexpectedly canceled the broadcast of a report on the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans by the U.S. government without due process. They were sent directly to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), Nayib Bukele’s brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Weiss pulled the segment after it had been promoted several times by the network itself, and at the last minute — just three hours before its scheduled broadcast on Sunday night. By that point, the piece of journalism had already passed all internal reviews. The justification she gave was that it did not contain sufficiently balanced information.

The decision was so unusual and so extreme that the Canadian rights holders (the Global TV app) did air the program in full, including the report, on the venerable Sunday news show 60 Minutes.

The canceled 14-minute segment, in which several of the deportees recount in detail the abuses and torture they suffered in prison, spread like wildfire on Tuesday via the cell phones of politicians, journalists, and experts on the Central American region in Washington.

The controversy began that same Sunday, when one of the journalists credited on the piece, Sharyn Alfonsi — a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent — sent an internal note to her newsroom colleagues accusing CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote in the message, which also ended up being leaked on social media. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Weiss gave her version of events in a statement on Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready."

During the editing process, the head of CBS News had expressed concern that the story did not include the Trump administration’s perspective, after none of its officials agreed to participate. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, also declined. Weiss gave the reporters Miller’s cell phone number so they could call him, but they were unsuccessful. In her complaint, Alfonsi says they requested “responses to questions and/or interviews with the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and the State Department.”

For the journalist, the decision not to air a report because the government refuses to participate is tantamount to granting the Trump administration veto power. “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story,” Alfonsi wrote in her note. “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.”

The latest CBS scandal involving Trump comes months after the network reached an agreement with the U.S. president to drop a lawsuit he had filed against its news division over the editing of an interview with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the final stretch of the 2024 election campaign, in which Trump regained the presidency. Trump accused the producers of 60 Minutes of favoring Harris.

CBS, then owned by Paramount, ultimately paid $16 million to appease him — a move that, combined with a similar one by ABC News, was widely interpreted as a capitulation to a president who has spent his first 11 months in office attacking press freedom in the courts.

Acquisition deal

The Trump administration later approved the purchase of CBS by Skydance Media, a company owned by billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and a personal friend of Trump. It was after that move that Weiss was appointed. She had made a name for herself as a columnist at The New York Times, an institution she left abruptly to found an opinion website called The Free Press, which Ellison acquired this year for $150 million.

The CBS News newsroom — whose members belong to something like the aristocracy of journalism in the United States — received her with hostility because of her lack of experience in two areas: television and reporting. One of her biggest achievements since taking the position was securing an interview with Trump, during which he praised her. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person,” the president said.

In recent weeks, Trump has signaled a change of heart regarding Weiss and Ellison. “I love the new owners of CBS,” Trump said at a rally. “Something happens to them, though. 60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership than… they just keep treating me, they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”

When Trump made that statement, CBS was already promoting the story “Inside CECOT.” They had also sent out a press release celebrating the report: “Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi speaks with some of the now released deportees, who describe the brutal and torturous conditions they endured inside CECOT.”

In her memo regarding the decision to pull the story, Alfonsi remembered the released deportees: “These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

One of the men interviewed was Luis Muñoz Pinto, a Venezuelan university student now living in Colombia. His testimony opens the report: “The first thing [the warden] told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said: ‘Welcome to hell.’” Pinto later says four guards beat him and broke one of his teeth.

Another Venezuelan, William Losada Sánchez, spoke of “the island,” a punishment cell where prisoners would be sent if they could not comply with being forced to sit on their knees for 24 hours a day. “The island is a little room where there’s no light, no ventilation, nothing. It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us,” he said.

As a result of the bungled handling of the story, the journalists can at least take some consolation in knowing that their reporting — through what can only be described as a fiasco — did air in Canada. What’s more, the segment is now circulating widely on cell phones, shared like contraband by those eager to see the content that Weiss had hoped would remain unseen.

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