CBS News is facing a backlash, including from one of its own correspondents, after it cancelled a 60 Minutes investigation into a brutal prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrants.
The episode of its flagship program about the Cecot mega-prison was due to air on Sunday night. However, in an “editor’s note” posted on X, the broadcaster’s official account announced that “the lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside Cecot’ will air in a future broadcast.”
A CBS News spokesperson said in an email that the segment “needed additional reporting”.
The terrorism confinement centre, known as Cecot, is Latin America’s largest prison, with capacity for 40,000 inmates. In March, the Trump administration struck a deal with El Salvador to send there more than 250 Venezuelan migrants that it accused of terrorism and gang membership.
Horror stories have since emerged about abuse the migrants are alleged to have endured, with lawyers for some of the men who were later released describing the conditions as “state-sanctioned torture”.
On Sunday, CBS removed a link to the “Inside Cecot” segment page. The page, which previously featured a trailer, now displays the message: “The page cannot be found.” A description on its Paramount Plus website earlier said the segment was scheduled to air at 7.30pm ET on Sunday.
It was slated to feature correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi speaking to recently released deportees about the “brutal and torturous” conditions they had endured in the prison.
An intro to a preview of the episode began: “The deportees thought they were headed from the US back to Venezuela, but instead they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras, and delivered to Cecot … where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.”
Alfonsi said in a private note to her CBS colleagues on Sunday that the episode “was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. 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.”
Elsewhere in the note, Alfonsi said her team had requested comment 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,” she said.
“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.
“I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight,” she wrote.
CBS News is now under the leadership of Bari Weiss, who was appointed as editor-in-chief of the storied US news network in October after its parent company, Paramount, acquired her startup the Free Press.
Weiss had seen the segment on Thursday and raised questions about it to its producers, asked for new material to be added, and suggested a new interview with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the rightwing architect of Trump’s anti-immigration policy, the New York Times reported.
The outlet also reported that Weiss questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the approximately 252 Venezuelan men who were deported on flights to El Salvador’s Cecot in March and April this year.
Weiss’s appointment sparked controversy among some CBS journalists who feared its owners were taking the network in a more conservative direction. Weiss had carved out a name for herself as a heterodox columnist and held no previous experience in broadcasting.
Weiss said in a statement: “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.”
The delayed transmission of the segment comes as the Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son David runs CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance Corp, has launched a hostile bid for Warners-Discovery – a deal that would require regulatory approval from Trump administration regulators.
Last week, Trump said that any impression of favorable treatment from the CBS news division was false. “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 posted to Truth Social. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
The cancellation of the Cecot investigation segment drew swift criticism and accusations of censorship on social media.
“What is happening to CBS is a terrible embarrassment and if executives think they can build shareholder value by avoiding journalism that might offend the Mad King they are about to learn a tough lesson,” the Hawaii senator Brian Schatz wrote on X. “This is still America and we don’t enjoy bullshit like this.”
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said in an X post that it was a “sad day for 60 Minutes and journalism”, and said that the Trump administration’s involvement in approving Skydance’s $8bn deal to buy Paramount had previewed the decision.
“This is entirely to please Trump, who has voiced criticism of 60 Minutes under the new owners, who are the definition of rank amateurs, emphasis on rank,” wrote the media maven Kara Swisher on Threads.
“This Stephen Miller interview suggestion is idiotic in the context of this story — doing another piece with him later is fine, but to add him here after the administration declines to officially have comment is a suck up …”
Political commentator Krystal Ball wrote: “Bari’s CBS pulled their Cecot report which included interviews with immigrants who were tortured in this concentration camp. The Trump regime does not want you to know what was done to these people.”
Reporter Brian Stelter posted on X that “people” internally at 60 Minutes were “threatening to quit over this”.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
