CECOT’S OUT OF THE BAG

CBS Boss’s ‘60 Minutes’ Intervention Backfires as Episode Leaks

Bari Weiss claimed a segment on CECOT didn’t advance reporting on the notorious megaprison enough, though staffers disagreed.

The 60 Minutes segment that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled from airing on Sunday has leaked.

The segment covers the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration sent some Venezuelan migrants. Canada’s Global TV aired the segment, according to CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, and it was later published elsewhere.

The Daily Beast has reached out to both CBS and Global TV for comment.

In the segment, Luis Munoz Pinto—a college student from Venezuela who sought asylum in the U.S. and says he has no criminal record—describes the scene at the prison the Trump administration deported him to.

“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” he said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”

Pinto also said, through a translator, that he was never given access to clean water.

“The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on,” he recalled, adding that doctors told injured inmates to drink it to help them recover. “The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.”

Pinto added that when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the facility in March, she did not speak with any of the prisoners.

“We only saw the cameras,” he said.

CBS pulled the segment approximately three hours before its scheduled Sunday night broadcast, saying it “needed additional reporting.”

Weiss, 41, told The New York Times: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready."

Yet Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran broadcaster who reported the segment, said it got pulled for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi, 53, wrote in a message to her CBS colleagues, per 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.”

PLOT THICKENS

‘60 Mins’ Host’s Email Denouncing Pro-Trump Censoring Leaks

Cameron Adams

Weiss was appointed to lead the CBS newsroom in October by David Ellison, owner of Paramount Skydance, the network’s parent company. Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount was approved by the Federal Communications Commission after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a suit that Donald Trump brought over a 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

Ellison is now working to outbid Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery—a move that would also require approval from the FCC.

Trump, less than 48 hours before Weiss pulled the CECOT segment, complained about how 60 Minutes had treated him.

“CBS, I mean, I love the new owners of CBS. Something happened to them, though,” he told a North Carolina crowd just two days before Weiss decided to spike the segment. “60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership. They just keep hitting me. It’s crazy.”

Play Video

Weiss had several concerns about the segment, according to the Times. For one, she said it needed an interview with a senior Trump administration official, like Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Alfonsi told her colleagues that she had reached out to the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department.

“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 wrote.

“We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet,” she added. “I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.”

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

William VaillancourtReporter

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.