Yesterday, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, censored a section of her newsmagazine 60 minutes About the men who were deported to an El Salvador prison. Today, it is emerging online.
60 minutes The now censored segment had already begun online promotion. Because it was pulled so late, it seems 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 being distributed through an iCloud account.
The section reviewed The VergeIs a little shy of 14 minutes long. It featured video of chained and twisted men who were “paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses and transported to CECOT”, according to the segment’s description. A former detainee interviewed by CBS 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 prison conditions, saying he was beaten until he bled and was slammed into a wall with such force that he broke a tooth. She also described sexual harassment by guards. Another interviewee, a former detainee, described what can only be described as torture: forced to kneel for 24 hours, and kept in a dark room, where they were beaten if they left the stress position.
“In my view, pulling this now after every rigorous internal investigation has been completed is not an editorial decision, it is a political decision.”
These people were among those deported to El Salvador, the country they are not from. The Trump administration has sent at least 288 people, mostly Venezuelans and Salvadorans, to CECOT after El Salvador President Nayib Bukele offered to hold the prisoners for a fee. According to this, many of those deported were awaiting asylum cases. the new York Times. This is perhaps the most appalling and breathtaking abuse of human rights on the part of the Trump administration, and an important area for continued reporting.
According to the segment, the Trump administration has more deals like CECOT in the pipeline, which are worth “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The US could begin deporting people to places they have no ties to, such as South Sudan and Uganda, which have “well-documented histories of torturing prisoners”.
Apart from breaking news about deals with other countries, the story appears to have been fully reported, and both the US Department of Homeland Security and El Salvador were given the opportunity to comment.
“Our story was checked five times and cleared by both CBS lawyers and Standards and Practices,” Sherin Alfonsi, the reporter who had the segment, wrote in an email to colleagues yesterday. the new York Times“That is factually correct, In my view, pulling it now after every rigorous internal investigation has been completed is not an editorial decision, it is a political decision,”
Because the order to end the story came so late, CBS did not successfully replace the original program everywhere it was scheduled to be distributed.
The story had received all the general approval, including Weiss, who suddenly changed his mind. He called for additional reporting, including “an on-camera interview with a member of the Trump administration”. Washington PostThe story was finished on Saturday night and the promotional material was removed on Sunday, Weiss sent an edit note saying, among other things, that the section did not adequately explain the administration’s reasoning for sending people to El Salvador,
The notes don’t seem out of place – except for their timing, which is delayed 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 put in charge of CBS News by David Ellison as part of an apparent effort to placate the Trump administration and allow his company, Skydance, to acquire CBS’s parent company, Paramount. President Donald Trump has repeatedly complained about CBS — and 60 minutes’ Work specifically. Just before the acquisition by Skydance, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over edits made 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 he “withheld that story because it wasn’t ready”. Washington PostThe team gave the White House a chance to comment, and the Trump administration declined 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 being an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state,” Alfonsi wrote in his email.
Anyway, congratulations to Weiss for brilliantly handling the DMCA with the story video. This section now lives as samizdat online. Thanks to Weiss’s censorship, this may become the most talked-about CBS News story of the year.
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