CBS News’ 60 Minutes pulled a planned segment on the Trump administration’s deportation of migrants to a harsh El Salvador prison, a move that the correspondent characterized as “political.”
“The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast,” the network announced on Sunday evening, just hours before the planned broadcast.
CBS News said of the segment, “We determined it needed additional reporting.”
The correspondent on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, criticized the network’s move in an email to colleagues, according to the note reviewed by Deadline and first reported by The New York Times. She wrote that it was Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, who made the decision to spike the story.
In her note, Alfonsi wrote that the piece had been screened five times and cleared by standards and practices and network attorneys. “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,” Alfonsi said.
In the note, Alfonsi suggested that the reason for pulling the segment was that the administration had refused to participate. “We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver destined to kill the story.”
She protested such a rationale for delaying it, writing, “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 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.”
A network spokesperson had no comment on Alfonsi’s note.
It’s a highly unusual move for the show to pull a segment so close to its airtime.
CBS News announced the segment on the 60 Minutes schedule last week. Per the network, the segment’s logline was: “Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, a country most had no ties to, claiming they were terrorists. This move sparked an ongoing legal battle, and nine months later the U.S. government still has not released the names of all those deported and placed in CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons.”
The segment was to feature Alfonsi speaking to deportees who told of “brutal and tortuous conditions,” per the network. In its place is a segment from Nottingham, England, where correspondent Jon Wertheim interviewed a family of celebrated classical musicians.
In her note, Alfonsi wrote that those she interviewed “risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tent of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”
The segment also was covering a topic that has been documented elsewhere, including in court hearings and records. One deportee, Andry José Hernández Romero, was detained for more than four months before being released, and has given multiple interviews where he described sexual and physical abuse in the notorious prison.
In October, new Paramount CEO David Ellison purchased center-right site The Free Press and hired its founder, Weiss, to lead the news division. While the CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings have been in third place, 60 Minutes has long been one of the network’s crown jewels, consistently leading in the ratings.
Trump has continued to rail against 60 Minutes, most recently for Lesley Stahl’s interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now one of the president’s high profile critics from the right.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”
Last year, Trump sued 60 Minutes over edits made to an interview with his 2024 presidential rival, Kamala Harris. Although CBS had initially dismissed the lawsuit as baseless, its parent company Paramount Global settled the litigation for $16 million, as it sought Trump administration approval for its merger with Skydance.
At a ceremony earlier this month to receive a Walter Cronkite Award, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said of the network’s new owners, “We were all concerned at 60 Minutes about what that meant. It’s early yet, but what I can tell you is we are doing to same kinds of stories with the same kind of rigor, and we have experienced no corporate interference of any kind.” Pelley pointed out that they had been able to get their stories on the air.
In April, the previous executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, resigned, saying that he no longer was able to “run the show as I have always run it,” and to “make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
Paramount has made a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a transaction that would also require approval from the Trump administration. The president has said that he will be part of the regulatory approval process, breaking the norm of keeping an arm’s length from the Justice Department review.