Yesterday, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, censored a segment of its newsmagazine 60 Minutes about men who had been deported to an El Salvador prison. Today, it’s popping up online.
60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at least one person recorded it, distributing it through an iCloud account.
The segment, which has been reviewed by The Verge, is a little shy of 14 minutes long. It features video of men, chained and bent double, being “paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT,” according to the segment’s narration. One former detainee, who CBS met in Colombia, said he was told he was “the living dead” at CECOT. After trying to seek asylum in the US, he says he was detained by customs and held for 6 months before being deported. He described horrific conditions at the prison, saying he was beaten until he bled and that he was thrown into a wall so hard he broke one of his teeth. He also described sexual assault by the guards. Another interviewed former detainee described what can only be called torture: being forced to kneel for 24 hours, and being put in a dark room, where they were beaten if they moved from the stress position.
“In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
The men were among those who had been deported to El Salvador, a country they are not from. The Trump administration has sent at least 288 people, mostly Venezuelans and Salvadorans, to CECOT after the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, offered to house prisoners for a fee. Many of the people who were deported were awaiting asylum cases, according to The New York Times. It is perhaps the most horrific and breathtaking abuse of human rights from the Trump administration, and a vital area for continued reporting.
The Trump administration has more deals like the one with CECOT in the pipeline, worth “millions of dollars,” according to the segment. The US may begin deporting people to places they have no relationship with, such as South Sudan and Uganda, which also have “well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.”
The story, in addition to breaking news about the deals with other countries, appears to be thoroughly reported, and both the US Department of Homeland Security and El Salvador were given opportunities to comment.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” wrote Sharyn Alfonsi, the reporter whose segment it was, in an email to colleagues yesterday, according to The New York Times. “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.”
Because the order to kill the story came so late, CBS didn’t successfully replace the original program everywhere that had been set to deliver it
The story had gotten through all the usual approvals, including Weiss, who suddenly changed her mind. She demanded additional reporting, “including an on-camera interview with a member of the Trump administration,” according to The Washington Post. The story was killed on Saturday night, and the promotional material was removed on Sunday. Weiss sent an edit note saying, among other things, that the segment did not adequately explain the administration’s rationale for sending people to El Salvador.
The notes do not seem unreasonable — except in their timing, which is belated and bizarre, practically calculated to cause an uproar. And, it seems, because the order to kill the story came so late, not every distributor replaced the program.
Weiss was placed in charge of CBS News by David Ellison as part of a fairly obvious attempt to placate the Trump administration and allow his company, Skydance, to acquire CBS parent company, Paramount. President Donald Trump has repeatedly whined about CBS — and 60 Minutes’ work in particular. Just before the takeover by Skydance, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over the editing applied to an interview with Kamala Harris.
Ellison’s Skydance is now attempting to buy Warner Bros. in a hostile bid.
Weiss claimed on an editorial call on Monday that she “held that story because it wasn’t ready,” according to The Washington Post. The team had given the White House a chance to comment, and the Trump administration declined, according to the Post. “If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state,” Alfonsi wrote in her email.
Anyway, best of luck to Weiss in playing DMCA whack-a-mole with the video of the story. The segment lives as online samizdat now. Thanks to Weiss’ censorship, it may very well wind up being the most-talked-about CBS News story this year.
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