A โ60 Minutesโ report yanked by Bari Weiss about the โhorrific treatmentโ of detainees deported from the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador has leaked online after appearing on a Canadian TV app. Canadaโs Global News aired the โ60 Minutesโ episode without the segment on television, as did CBS, but the networkโs Global TV app mistakenly uploaded the wrong episode to its streaming app.
Footage of the nearly 14-minute segment circulated on social media despite being pulled from the CBS News schedule about three hours before airtime on Sunday. In the segment, reviewed by Variety, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed a man forcibly removed from the U.S. and sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison by the Trump administration, despite having no criminal record.
โThere was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldnโt take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,โ said Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who sought asylum in the U.S. He said he spent six months detained by customs, waiting for a decision on his asylum case, before he was deported.
โFour 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,โ Pinto added.
CBS News has not yet commented on the leak.
On Monday morning, the networkโs editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, told staffers she axed the report on Saturday โbecause it wasnโt ready,โ although โ60 Minutesโ correspondents felt it was โnot an editorial decisionโ but โa political one.โ According to The New York Times, Weiss suggested โnumerous changes to the segmentโ and wanted it to feature an interview with Stephen Miller or another senior Trump administration official. She said the piece was centered on information that had already been reported by the Times, and โwe simply need to do more.โ
Alfonsi said she already requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department. In a leaked email to her CBS colleagues on Sunday, Alfonsi wrote, โOur story 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.โ
The last-minute decision to pull a โ60 Minutesโ segment critical of the Trump administration comes after repeated complaints by the president about โunfair treatmentโ by the David Ellison-owned network. On Dec. 16, Trump wrote on Truth Social, โFor 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 โtakeover,โ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, Iโd hate to see my enemies!โ A week before that, Trump blasted โ60 Minutesโ for its interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called a โvery poorly prepared Traitor,โ and said of parent company Paramount: โTHEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.โ
Ellisonโsย Paramount Skydance has launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, attempting to convince shareholders to reject WBDโs agreed upon deal with Netflix, which is set to acquire the Warner Bros. studios operations and HBO Max. Trump previously asserted that he would be โinvolvedโ in approving the M&A deal, which would require sign-offs from regulators including the U.S. Justice Department and FTC.ย
Earlier this year, Ellisonโs Skydance Media acquired Paramount Global in an $8 billion deal. A few months later, Ellison announced a deal reportedly worth $150 million to acquire Weissโ independent media outlet The Free Press, appointing Weissย as CBS Newsโ head of editorial. Those moves were seen as an attempt to improve CBS Newsโ standing with Trump and the MAGA movement. Since then, Weiss has moderated a town hall with Erika Kirk, the CEO of right-wing advocacy group Turning Point USA and the widow of Charlie Kirk, and promised future events with guests like JD Vance and Sam Altman.
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