Here’s the deleted trailer for the now-“delayed” segment. It’s almost impressive how much damage Bari Weiss has done to CBS News in such a short period of time.
Someone quickly schedule a prime-time Town Hall with Alan Dershowitz to rectify the harm:pic.twitter.com/382gRG5Lgp https://t.co/3gHRKNES2y
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 21, 2025
The liberal media’s panic button was smashed Sunday night after CBS News abruptly postponed a highly promoted 60 Minutes segment targeting President Donald Trump’s deportation policy—and critics immediately went nuclear.
At 4:31 p.m. ET, just two and a half hours before airtime, 60 Minutes announced it was pulling a segment titled “Inside CECOT,” a report centered on El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the maximum-security prison opened in 2023 by President Nayib Bukele as part of his crackdown on violent gangs.
The prison—feared by criminals and praised by law-and-order leaders—has previously drawn admiration from President Trump himself. Earlier this year, Trump said he was “very impressed” with CECOT and added he would “love” to send American crooks there.
That context didn’t stop critics from declaring a five-alarm emergency.
According to CBS, the segment—reported by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi—included interviews with deportees who described what a network press release previewed as “brutal and torturous conditions.” But a CBS spokesperson told Puck reporter Dylan Byers that editors decided the report “needed additional reporting.”
That explanation was immediately rejected by media activists on X, who treated the delay not as an editorial decision—but as proof of ideological sabotage.
The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald reposted a teaser trailer—later removed from CBS’s website—and blasted the network’s new leadership. “It’s almost impressive how much damage Bari Weiss has done to CBS News in such a short period of time,” Greenwald wrote.
Others went further. Journalist Adam Cochran, after calling 60 Minutes “a crown jewel of journalistic integrity and quality,” accused Weiss of political interference. “The fact that it’s now under the thumb of Bari Weiss who is pulling pieces for political reasons, is a heinous betrayal of the 4th Estate,” he wrote.
YouTube personality Kyle Kulinski escalated the rhetoric dramatically, claiming without evidence: “Bari Weiss just CENSORED AND BANNED a 60 Minutes episode exposing how Trump sent immigrants to be TORTURED AND RAPED in a concentration camp.”
Still others framed the move as unprecedented. Journalist Peter Twinklage claimed: “A source inside CBS News tells me a move like this is ‘effectively unprecedented’ in the history of 60 Minutes… the idea of killing a finished piece… hours before air is insane.”
Meanwhile, CBS parent company Paramount Skydance had already summarized the report’s premise days earlier, stating that the Trump administration had deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, claiming they were terrorists—an action now tied up in ongoing legal battles, with the government still not releasing all the names of those sent to CECOT.
Even mainstream media figures appeared rattled. Political analyst Tom Sherwood said the “public needs to know why” the segment was delayed, while New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush echoed Byers’ reporting and asked, “Has this ever happened before?”
A longtime correspondent has gone nuclear after the highly sensitive segment on Trump-era deportations was abruptly yanked from the broadcast schedule just two hours before airtime, igniting a furious internal clash that’s now spilling into the open.
Sharyn Alfonsi, a 60 Minutes reporter since 2015, is publicly accusing new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of censorship — and of caving to political pressure — after Weiss pulled a segment examining the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison.
According to Alfonsi, the piece was “screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct.” Yet at the eleventh hour, it vanished. Alfonsi was livid.
In a blistering internal email sent to newsroom heavyweights including Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, and Anderson Cooper, Alfonsi said she had “asked for a call” with Weiss to discuss the decision — but claimed Weiss “did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.”
She didn’t stop there.
“Pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” Alfonsi charged.
The segment focused on Venezuelan men who believed they were being deported back to their home country — only to find themselves locked inside CECOT, El Salvador’s high-security mega-prison, which they described as “brutal and torturous.”
CBS itself had been promoting the story for days.
“Our viewers are expecting it,” Alfonsi warned in her email. “When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship.”
She argued that the real reason the story was shelved was simple: the Trump administration declined to comment. “If that is a valid reason to spike a story,” she wrote, “we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
Her warning escalated from there. “If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.
We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.” Alfonsi also claimed the sources she interviewed “risked their lives” by speaking on camera. “We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories,” she wrote. “Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”
Weiss, for her part, pushed back — denying that politics played any role at all.
“My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” Weiss told The New York Times. “Holding stories that aren’t ready — that lack sufficient context or are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom.”
She added, “I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
But Alfonsi wasn’t buying it. In her view, the damage is already done. “We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet,” she concluded. “I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.”
