The 60 Minutes Segment That Was Pulled by Bari Weiss Has Leaked Online

The 60 Minutes segment that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled from airing in what some have criticized as a political decision ended up circulating online after Canada’s Global News played it on its Global TV app. (First, Heated Rivalry, and now this … Canada has given the world so much this year.) The nearly 14-minute report examines the conditions at CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration has deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. In the segment, originally set to run on December 21, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviews several former detainees and states that 60 Minutes has independently corroborated the Human Rights Watch’s previous findings that CECOT detainees experienced “systematic torture” and that nearly half the men in the prison have no criminal history.

CBS announced the removal of Alfonsi’s segment three hours before broadcast, stating that it “needed additional reporting” and would “air in a future broadcast.” Sources at CBS told CNN that Weiss “took issue with the phrasing of ‘migrant detainees,’” while the New York Times reported that Weiss had suggested “numerous changes” to the segment and wanted it to include an interview with White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller or another high-ranking official in the Trump administration. According to CNN, Weiss said in a December 22 CBS editorial call that other outlets have run similar reports and that the public is already aware that Venezuelans have “been subjected to horrific treatment” at CECOT. “To run a story on this subject two months later, we need to do more,” she argued. “And this is 60 Minutes. We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on-camera.”

Alfonsi previously took issue with this perspective in a December 21 email to colleagues that asserted she had reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and the State Department for comment. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story,” Alfonsi wrote in the message obtained by The Wall Street Journal, “we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” She also noted that her segment had been screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and standards and practices. “It is factually correct,” she said. “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 was appointed the head of CBS News in October after tech billionaire David Ellison acquired her conservative digital-media outlet The Free Press. Ellison’s Skydance Media had acquired CBS through its Donald Trump–approved merger with Paramount Global in August. Ellison and his father are currently trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery with Paramount claiming that it has a better chance of getting government approval than Netflix. But the president seems to have recently soured on Paramount, specifically because of its 60 Minutes coverage. Earlier this month, he criticized the program’s interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene and denounced parent company Paramount as “NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.” In a December 16 post on Truth Social, Trump distanced himself from Ellison. “For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” he wrote. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”