CBS postpones ’60 Minutes’ report on El Salvador’s CECOT prison

By Siddharth Cavale

NEW YORK, Dec 21 (Reuters) – CBS News pulled a “60 Minutes” report on El Salvador’s CECOT prison just hours before its scheduled Sunday broadcast, saying it would air at a future time.

“The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated,” the program posted on social media. “Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast,” the program posted on X and other social media platforms three hours before it was slated to air.

A CBS News spokesperson said in an email that the segment “needed additional reporting.”

The New York Times, quoting from a copy of a note written by Sharyn Alfonsi, a correspondent who reported the segment, said CBS pulled 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 note, a copy of which was obtained by the 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.”

 She told the newspaper on Sunday evening: “I refer all questions to Bari Weiss.”

CECOT is a mega-prison in El Salvador where the U.S. has sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants without trial. It has been condemned by human rights groups for its harsh conditions.

LINK REMOVED

CBS removed a link to the “Inside CECOT” segment page on Sunday. The page, which previously featured a trailer, now displays “The page cannot be found” message. 

However, a description on its Paramount Plus website earlier said the segment was scheduled to air at 7:30 p.m. ET Sunday, with Alfonsi speaking to recently released deportees about the “brutal and torturous” conditions they had endured in the prison.

Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss raised several concerns with “60 Minutes” producers about Alfonsi’s segment and requested a substantial amount of new material to be added, NYT reported, citing sources.

She suggested adding an interview with White House official Stephen Miller or another senior Trump administration figure, the report said. Weiss further questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting they were in the U.S. illegally, the report added.

In her note, Alfonsi stated that her team had sought comments from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

“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 was quoted as saying.

CBS News and Alfonsi did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report outside normal business hours.

The decision comes as the network goes through changes under Weiss, who was picked to lead CBS News in October after CBS parent company Paramount Skydance acquired the online publication she founded, The Free Press.

Weiss, a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion writer, was considered by some analysts as a controversial choice as she had never managed a television newsroom or produced broadcast news content before.

On December 10 she named Tony Dokoupil as the new anchor of its flagship “CBS Evening News” segment, replacing the dual anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.

(Reporting by Siddharth Cavale in New York and Ruchika Khanna in Bengaluru; editing by Diane Craft and Stephen Coates)