CBS News has postponed a 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s CECOT prison mere hours before it was set to air on Sunday, announcing it will be broadcast at a later date.
“The schedule for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been revised,” the program stated on social media. “Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future episode,” the program shared on X and other platforms three hours prior to its planned air time.
A representative from CBS News remarked via email that the segment “required further reporting.”
According to a report by The New York Times, referencing a note from Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who covered the segment, CBS made the decision to withdraw the report for “political” reasons.
“Our story was reviewed five times and approved by both CBS lawyers and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi noted in the memo, a copy of which was acquired by the Times.
“It is factually accurate. In my opinion, retracting it now, after all rigorous internal evaluations have been satisfied, is not an editorial choice; it is a political one.”
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On Sunday evening, she informed the newspaper: “I direct all inquiries to Bari Weiss.”
CECOT is a massive prison in El Salvador where the U.S. has deported hundreds of predominantly Venezuelan migrants without trial. Human rights organizations have criticized it for its severe conditions.
CBS is a subsidiary of Paramount Skydance PSKY.O. Paramount was acquired by Skydance Media, led by David Ellison—the son of long-time Trump supporter Larry Ellison—in August. David Ellison facilitated regulatory approval for the acquisition with the assurance that CBS would represent the “diverse ideological viewpoints” of American audiences.
Before the acquisition, Paramount settled a $16 million US lawsuit from Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, which he claimed misrepresented his opponent in the presidential race.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has stated that the settlement and regulatory review were unrelated.
Weiss requested significant new content
On Sunday, CBS removed the link to the “Inside CECOT” segment page. The page, which had previously displayed a trailer, now indicates: “The page cannot be found.”
However, a description on the Paramount Plus website had earlier indicated that the segment was set to air at 7:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, featuring Alfonsi interviewing recently deported individuals about the “brutal and torturous” conditions they faced in the prison.
The New York Times reported that Weiss raised multiple concerns with the 60 Minutes producers regarding Alfonsi’s segment and requested a considerable amount of new content be incorporated.
A prison guard handcuffs an inmate during a media tour on April 4 at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, where the U.S. has sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants without trial. CBS removed a link to the ‘Inside CECOT’ segment page on Sunday. (Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
She proposed including an interview with White House official Stephen Miller or another senior figure from the Trump administration, the report indicated. Weiss also questioned the terminology used to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, suggesting the term “migrants” was misleading given their illegal status in the U.S., the report noted.
In her note, Alfonsi mentioned that her team had reached out for comments from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.
“If the administration’s unwillingness to engage becomes a legitimate reason to cancel a story, we have essentially granted them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they deem inconvenient,” Alfonsi was quoted as saying.
CBS News and Alfonsi did not provide an immediate response to a request for comment regarding the report outside of regular business hours.
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This decision comes as the network undergoes transformations under Weiss, who was appointed to lead CBS News in October following the acquisition of her founded publication, The Free Press, by CBS’s parent company Paramount Skydance.
Weiss, who previously worked as an opinion writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, was viewed by some analysts as a contentious choice, given her lack of experience managing a television newsroom or producing broadcast news content.
On December 10, she appointed Tony Dokoupil as the new anchor for its flagship CBS Evening News program, succeeding the dual anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
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