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You may have heard of the biggest story on CBS News’ 60 Minutes this year. It was a report that the show never aired. The network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled the segment, about what happened to migrants deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, less than 48 hours before it was supposed to air.
Now, editors-in-chief often, annoyingly, ask for changes in stories. I was one, and I did it. But what no editor in her right mind will do is yank a piece at the last minute, after it has been reported, vetted, fact-checked, lawyered, greenlit for publication, and promoted for several days. For if you do that, the issue will no longer be the reporting. The issue will be your management. (You will also, because of the Streisand Effect, draw much more attention to the story than it otherwise would have gotten. The yanked 60 Minutes segment quickly became available in a million places on the internet, including a transcript here.)
There are only two ways for people to read a decision like this. One: The editor believes her team is so incompetent, they were about to air a story that would do irreparable harm. Two: The editor is willing to throw her team under the bus to curry favor with the powers that be.
In CBS News’ case, we might have a rare instance where both are true: The editor, who has been hired to curry favor with the powers that be, also truly believes that her team is incompetent.
Five days into the debacle, Weiss wrote a memo to staff to explain why she had yanked the story. It lectures her colleagues about basic journalistic fairness: In order to gain viewers’ trust, she says, journalists need to “work hard.” (Why, yes.) “Sometimes that means doing more legwork…And sometimes it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”
If it’s hard to follow the journalistic logic here, it makes sense to look at another kind—the brutal logic of corporate media in Trump’s America.
How to ensure that a story is “comprehensive and fair”? In another memo, Weiss elaborated that the CECOT story didn’t try hard enough to show the “genuine debate” about the legality of the deportations. Producers had already requested comment from the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the White House, to no avail. But, Weiss wrote, they needed to ask again. “I tracked down cell numbers for [border czar Tom] Homan and [Stephen] Miller and sent those along.”
Weiss is right, of course, that journalists should work hard to capture “genuine debate.” But the CECOT segment was not about the legal issues around deporting people to the prison. It was about what happened to them once they got there: food deprivation, stress positions, isolation. Torture.
Was Weiss saying that there is a “genuine debate” about whether these things happened? How would Stephen Miller’s view help us assess that?
If it’s hard to follow the journalistic logic here, it makes sense to look at another kind—the brutal logic of corporate media in Trump’s America. And the best way to understand that one is a quick timeline.
October 31, 2024: Five days before the election, Donald Trump files a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS over its routine editing of an interview with Kamala Harris.
January 22, 2025: Two days after Trump takes office, the Federal Communications Commission—which has the power to approve or deny the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to billionaire father-and-son team Larry and David Ellison—opens its own investigation of the Harris interview.
April 21, 2025: The longtime head of 60 Minutes resigns, saying he has “lost independence” from corporate.
July 2, 2025: Paramount settles Trump’s lawsuit with a $16 million payment.
July 11, 2025: News leaks that David Ellison has been talking with Weiss about acquiring her startup, The Free Press, and giving her a leadership role at CBS if he buys Paramount.
July 24, 2025: FCC approves Paramount sale to Ellison.
October 6, 2025: Weiss installed as CBS News’ editor-in-chief.
October 16, 2025: Claudia Milne, CBS’s head of standards and practices—the executive whose job it is to make sure the newsroom abides by its legal and ethical rules—resigns.
December 8, 2025: David Ellison launches a hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns CNN. The sale would require approval from the FCC. Ellison reportedly has told the Trump administration that he would make sweeping changes at CNN if the sale goes through.
December 16, 2025: Trump lashes out at Ellison and CBS, saying they have “treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before.” He specifically calls out 60 Minutes.
December 18, 2025: Weiss screens the 60 Minutes segment about CECOT and, according to producers, gives some comments, which are integrated into the script. Newsroom leadership greenlights the segment for broadcast.
December 19, 2025: Around midnight, Weiss lets the producers know that she has more concerns. Running the story as is, she says, would be “doing our viewers a disservice.”
December 21, 2025: 60 Minutes airs without the CECOT segment.
Bottom line: Weiss was plucked from running a small, conservative-leaning newsroom and installed atop CBS when the network’s owner, David Ellison, was currying favor with the Trump administration. Then, right as Ellison needed Trump regulatory approval to merge, she yanked a story that the administration was bound to have complaints about.
Maybe someday a revised CECOT piece will air (to, probably, a smaller audience than the millions who have watched the leaked version online), perhaps with some on-camera comment from Stephen Miller about how “third world” immigrants deserve what they get. But whatever we learn from the story at that point won’t tell us as much as what we’ve already learned.
In authoritarian regimes, you sometimes find independent reporting and public expressions of dissent. Even in the old Soviet Union, they let some of that slide. But “letting it slide” is the point. You are meant to know that what you are allowed to see has been approved by the people in charge.
So too, now, with CBS News. There are still great journalists working there, and great stories being published. But now we know that these stories will only be seen when the bosses allow it. And not all those bosses are working at CBS News.
If I were not part of a nonprofit, reader-supported newsroom, that melancholy note might be the one to end on. But luckily, because I work for Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, I get to say one more thing: We—you, me, millions of other Americans—don’t have to settle for this. We can have news that isn’t in thrall to billionaires, administration water-carriers, or corporate honchos. Mother Jones is an example of how journalism can stay independent and free even, and especially, now.
We run on donations from readers who trust us to dig up the truth and report it without fear. And right now, we are pushing up against a big end-of-year deadline. A lot of the support that determines whether our newsroom can go full bore next year comes in during the month of December. So if you can see your way clear to pitching in, again or for the first time, thank you so much.
