‘I ultimately had to comply’: ‘60 Minutes’ EP faces fallout after Bari Weiss shelves story; The Washington Post, December 22, 2025

 

Liam Scott

 and 

Scott Nover

, The Washington Post; ‘I ultimately had to comply’: ‘60 Minutes’ EP faces fallout after Bari Weiss shelves story

"Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, said requiring on-camera interviews with administration officials could be abused to manipulate coverage.

“It would give them the power to pick and choose which stories they want to go out,” McBride said. “It would allow them to literally craft the narrative themselves.”

It’s also uncommon for such a deeply reported segment to be pulled at the last minute, according to McBride. “This is a really high stakes story, and if she [Weiss] wanted to be involved in the process of green lighting or red lighting, that should not happen the day before the story is ready to run,” McBride said."

Yanked "60 Minutes" episode aired in Canada; Axios, December 22, 2025

 Sara Fischer , Axios; Yanked "60 Minutes" episode aired in Canada

[Kip Currier: CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss "knows her assignment": run editorial interference for oligarch Paramount Skydance tech baron bosses Larry and David Ellison (who own CBS) and the Trump 2.0 administration.

In one of the first major tests of Weiss's censorial assignment, she has both succeeded and failed: (1) blocking the airing of a damning 60 Minutes segment set to hear on December 21, 2025 on the human rights and due process violations of the Trump 2.0 administration in deporting detainees to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison gulag, and (2) unsuccessfully stopping the blocked video from leaking to Canada and the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.]

[Excerpt]

"The "60 Minutes" segment pulled from air by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss did not include new comments from Trump administration officials, according to a copy of the segment viewed by Axios.

Why it matters: The segment, anchored by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, caused uproar internally over whether it was pulled for political reasons. 

• The package was distributed via an app owned by Global Television which airs "60 Minutes" in Canada.

Zoom in: The segment included interviews with two people who were imprisoned at CECOT, an executive from the nonprofit Human Rights Watch and the director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center Investigations Lab.

• One college student, who was detained by U.S. customs before getting deported to CECOT, describes being tortured upon arrival. 
• 
  
• Another man told Alfonsi that he and others were taken to "a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing."
• 
  
• "It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour, and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there."
• 
  
• "60 Minutes" also said it reviewed available ICE data to confirm Human Rights Watch's findings that suggested only eight deported men had been sentenced for violent or potentially violent crimes.
• 
  

The other side: The segment ends with Alfonsi saying the Department of Homeland Security "declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request."

• The segment included previous comments made by President Trump, who said El Salvador's prison system has "very strong facilities, and they don't play games.""