Bari Weiss Has Thrown the CBS News
Killswitch
The Trump administration now has a
veto over the Tiffany Network’s newsroom.
Noam Galai/Getty
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CBS News’ Bari Weiss
In
1995, 60 Minutes made a decision that nearly destroyed the
program. Producers killed an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco industry
whistleblower who had evidence that cigarette companies knew their products
were addictive and carcinogenic. CBS’s lawyers were worried about a potential
lawsuit, so the interview got shelved. The story eventually came out anyway,
the lawyers’ fears proved overblown, and 60 Minutes spent
years trying to rebuild its credibility. The whole debacle became the basis
for The Insider, a 1999 film starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino that
portrayed CBS executives as cowards who caved to corporate pressure at the
expense of the public interest.
It
was, by any measure, a low point in the history of American broadcast
journalism.
On
Sunday, 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent an internal memo to colleagues warning
that CBS was repeating that history. The network had just killed her story
about Venezuelan migrants who were deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison,
where they were allegedly tortured, beaten, and subjected to sexual violence.
The segment had been promoted on social media for days. It had been screened
five times. It had been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and its Standards and
Practices division. It was, by all accounts, ready to air.
Then
Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, pulled it.
“CBS
spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying
the credibility of this broadcast,” Alfonsi wrote in her memo. “It took years
to recover from that ‘low point.’ By pulling this story to shield an
administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather
than legal ones.”
That
distinction matters. In 1995, CBS killed a story because executives were afraid
of getting sued. It was cowardly, but at least there was a concrete fear
driving the decision. In 2025, CBS killed a story because the Trump
administration declined to comment on it.
That’s
the official explanation, anyway. And if that standard holds, American
journalism is in serious trouble.
Let
me walk through the timeline here, because the speed of it is remarkable.
On
Friday morning, CBS sent out a press release promoting the upcoming segment.
“Inside CECOT,” it was called. The network described it as a
look at “one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons,” featuring interviews with
recently released deportees who would describe “the brutal and torturous
conditions they endured.” CBS ran promotional clips on the air and on social
media. The 60 Minutes website had a page up for the segment.
On
Friday night, Donald Trump held a rally in North Carolina. He complained about 60 Minutes, saying the
program had “treated me worse under the new ownership” and that if the
Ellisons, who now control CBS’s parent company, “are friends, I’d hate to see
my enemies!”
On
Saturday morning, Weiss weighed in with concerns about the segment. According
to CNN’s reporting, she took issue with the lack of an on-camera response from
the Trump administration. She suggested the segment needed an interview with
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and provided his contact
information to 60 Minutes staff.
By
Sunday afternoon, the story was dead. CBS posted on social media that the
segment would “air in a future broadcast.” The promotional page was taken down.
The clips were removed from YouTube. A CBS spokesperson told reporters the segment “needed
additional reporting.”
Alfonsi
wasn’t having it. In her memo, she wrote that she and her producer had asked
for a call with Weiss to discuss the decision. Weiss “did not afford us that
courtesy/opportunity.”
“Our
story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards
and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote. “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.”
She
went further. The segment’s reporters had reached out to the Department of
Homeland Security, the White House, and the State Department for comment. None
of them responded. According to Alfonsi, this silence was strategic.
“Government
silence is a statement, not a VETO,” she wrote. “Their refusal to be
interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. 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.”
That
phrase, “kill switch,” is the right way to think about what just happened. If
the new standard at CBS News is that critical stories about the government
can’t air unless the government agrees to participate, then the government has
been given the power to suppress any coverage it doesn’t like. All officials
have to do is refuse to engage. No comment becomes a veto.
Think
about what this standard would have meant historically. No Pentagon Papers
coverage, since the Nixon administration certainly wasn’t going to sit for an
interview about it. No Abu Ghraib reporting, since the Bush administration
didn’t exactly want to chat about torture photos. No Watergate, unless the
burglars agreed to go on camera. The entire history of adversarial journalism
depends on the premise that reporters can publish true, well-sourced
information even when the subjects of that information would prefer they
didn’t. What Weiss has done is abandon that premise.
Bari
Weiss has spent years building a brand as a defender of free expression and a
critic of censorship in mainstream institutions.
In
2020, she resigned from the New York Times with
a public letter accusing her colleagues of fostering an “illiberal environment”
where certain viewpoints were suppressed. She went on to co-found The Free
Press, a publication that positioned itself as a corrective to mainstream
media’s alleged ideological blind spots. She gave a TED Talk about
building alternatives to legacy media. She cultivated an image as someone
willing to publish uncomfortable truths that established outlets were too
squeamish or too captured to touch.
But
Weiss’s commitment to free speech has always been selective. Her career didn’t
start with defending controversial voices; it started with trying to get people
fired for expressing the wrong opinions about Israel.
As a
student at Columbia University in the mid-2000s, Weiss co-founded a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom,
which targeted Arab and Muslim professors in the Middle East studies
department. The campaign, which grew out of a documentary called “Columbia
Unbecoming,” accused professors like Joseph Massad of intimidating Jewish and
pro-Israel students. As Glenn Greenwald documented in a 2017
article for The Intercept, the New York Civil Liberties Union
condemned the effort as a “witch hunt designed to punish Israel critics.”
Columbia conducted an investigation and found the allegations largely baseless.
In
a follow-up piece at The Intercept in
2018, Greenwald described the activism Weiss helped lead as
“designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms
of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying.” Several of the targeted
professors lacked tenure at the time, meaning they were vulnerable to exactly
the kind of pressure Weiss’s group applied.
This
wasn’t a one-time thing. Weiss also participated in a campaign against Nadia
Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist at Barnard who had written a
scholarly book examining the archaeological claims underlying Israeli
territorial claims. Despite Abu El-Haj’s academic credentials and the awards
her book had received, an online petition emerged demanding she be denied
tenure. Weiss wrote a column attacking
Abu El-Haj’s scholarship in Haaretz.
And
as recently as 2019, Weiss was still at it. When Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley
was invited to speak at Stanford, a law student wrote an op-ed comparing
Valley’s satirical work to Nazi propaganda and calling for his talk to be
canceled. Weiss amplified the piece on Twitter,
thanking the author and endorsing his characterization of Valley’s art as
“hatred that gloms onto Jews and the Jewish State.” Valley, who had drawn
satirical cartoons critical of right-wing Jewish figures and Israeli policies,
responded that Weiss’s intervention forced Stanford to move his presentation to
a closed venue with security due to safety concerns. As I wrote at Media Matters at the
time, this was “precisely the kind of campus controversy” that Weiss
would have decried if the politics were reversed: a student group trying to
intimidate a speaker out of appearing on campus. Instead, she sided with those
doing the intimidating.
So:
a career that began with trying to silence Arab professors, that continued with
attacking a Palestinian-American scholar’s tenure bid, and that as recently as
six years ago involved amplifying calls to cancel a Jewish cartoonist because
his politics on Israel were wrong. This is the person now running CBS News.
This is the person who killed a factually accurate, legally cleared story about
human rights abuses because the administration wouldn’t comment on it.
The
irony is almost too much to bear. Weiss built her brand warning about
censorship in mainstream newsrooms. Now she runs a mainstream newsroom and
she’s the one doing the censoring. The difference is that when she was at the
Times, she complained about the suppression of certain opinions and viewpoints.
What she’s suppressing at CBS isn’t opinion. It’s documented reporting on
torture.
And
it’s not just the decision to kill the story that’s telling. According to NPR’s reporting, Weiss
objected to the segment’s use of the term “Venezuelan migrants” to describe the
deportees. She preferred “illegal immigrants,” the term favored by the Trump
administration. But many of the men sent to CECOT weren’t in the country
illegally at all. They had applied for asylum and were awaiting decisions on
their applications. Calling them “illegal immigrants” isn’t a neutral editorial
choice. It’s adopting the administration’s framing as your own.
This
is what alignment looks like. It’s not just killing stories the government
doesn’t want aired. It’s policing language to make sure the stories that do air
reflect the government’s preferred terminology.
On
Monday, Weiss addressed CBS staff about
the decision. “I held a 60 Minutes story because it was not ready,” she said.
“While the story presented powerful testimony of torture at CECOT, it did not
advance the ball. The Times and other outlets have previously done similar
work.”
That
explanation doesn’t hold up. The whole point of television news is to bring
stories to audiences who might not read the New York Times or Human Rights
Watch reports. “Someone else already covered this” has never been a reason to
kill a 60 Minutes segment. If it were, the program would
hardly ever air anything.
So
what was actually in the segment CBS killed?
We
don’t know for sure, since it hasn’t aired. But we know what the underlying
story is, because human rights organizations have been documenting it for
months.
In
March and April of this year, the Trump administration deported roughly 250
Venezuelan men to El Salvador. They weren’t sent back to Venezuela, their home
country. They were sent to a country most of them had no connection to
whatsoever, and they were imprisoned in CECOT, a mega-prison that El Salvador’s
president, Nayib Bukele, built as part of his crackdown on gang violence.
The
administration claimed these men were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, a
Venezuelan criminal organization. But according to Human Rights Watch,
which conducted extensive interviews with 40 of the deportees after their
release, approximately half of them had no criminal records at all. Only 3% had
been convicted in the United States for a violent crime. Many had applied for
asylum. Some had fled Venezuela specifically because they were being persecuted
by the Maduro government or threatened by the very gangs the U.S. accused them
of belonging to.
None
of them got a hearing. None of them got to argue their case. They were put on
planes in the middle of the night and sent to a prison in a foreign country,
where they were held for four months with no access to lawyers, no contact with
their families, and no idea if they would ever get out.
And
they were tortured.
That’s
not my characterization. That’s the conclusion of Human Rights Watch and Cristosal,
a Salvadoran human rights organization, after interviewing the men and
reviewing the evidence. Their report, titled “You Have Arrived in Hell,”
documents systematic beatings, sexual violence, and inhumane conditions. The
men were beaten when they arrived at the prison. They were beaten during daily
cell searches. They were beaten for speaking too loudly, for showering at the
wrong time, for requesting medical treatment. They were beaten after visits
from the International Committee of the Red Cross, apparently as punishment for
talking to outsiders.
Several
men told Human Rights Watch they were subjected to sexual violence. One
described being taken to a solitary confinement area called “the Island,” where
guards sexually assaulted him and forced him to perform oral sex. The report
notes that other victims were likely unwilling to speak about what happened due
to stigma.
Human
Rights Watch concluded that these weren’t isolated incidents by rogue guards.
The abuses were “systematic violations that took place repeatedly” and appeared
to be “part of a practice designed to subjugate, humiliate, and discipline
detainees.” The organization also concluded that the Trump administration was
“complicit” in torture and enforced disappearances by sending people to a
facility where abuse was entirely foreseeable.
This
is what Sharyn Alfonsi was trying to report. This is what CBS decided Americans
shouldn’t see. Should this segment ever air, it’s safe to assume it will have
been significantly edited to shield the Trump administration from criticism.
Why
would Bari Weiss, or the Ellisons who pay her salary, care about protecting the
Trump administration from critical coverage?
The
answer probably has as much to do with business as it has to do with ideology.
It started before they even arrived.
Back
in April, Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned after 37 years at CBS News.
“It’s clear that I’ve become the problem. I am the corporation’s problem,” he
told his staff, his voice breaking. The catalyst was a $10 billion lawsuit
Trump had filed against CBS over what he called a “deceptively edited”
interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. Legal experts considered
the suit frivolous, but that didn’t matter. Shari Redstone, then the
controlling shareholder of Paramount, was trying to secure Trump administration
approval for the company’s sale to Skydance, the company run by David Ellison.
She reportedly pushed for a settlement with Trump despite the absurdity of his
claims. Owens refused to go along with the corporate pressure and was pushed
out.
“Over
the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the
show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was
right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience,” Owens wrote in his
resignation memo.
The
eventual settlement, in which CBS paid Trump $16 million despite having done
nothing wrong, helped smooth the merger’s path through federal regulators. So
by the time the Ellisons officially took control, the pattern had already been
established: when Trump complains, CBS caves.
Paramount
Skydance, the company that owns CBS, is currently in the middle of a hostile takeover bid for Warner
Bros. Discovery. The deal is valued at around $108 billion. If it
goes through, the Ellisons would control an enormous swath of American media:
CBS, Paramount Pictures, and potentially HBO, TBS, TNT, the Discovery networks,
and CNN.
Yes,
CNN. The deal Paramount is pursuing would give the Ellisons control of the
cable news network that Trump has spent years attacking as “fake news.” On December 10, Trump said
at a White House event that “it’s imperative that CNN be sold” and that “the
people that have run CNN for the last long period of time are a disgrace.”
David Ellison told CNBC that
Paramount wants to “build a scaled news service that is basically,
fundamentally, in the trust business, that is in the truth business, and that
speaks to the 70% of Americans that are in the middle.” He didn’t mention that
this vision apparently includes killing stories about torture when the
administration doesn’t feel like commenting.
A
deal that big requires regulatory approval. Specifically, it requires approval
from the Department of Justice, which is run by the Trump administration.
Larry
Ellison, David’s father and the co-founder of Oracle, has been a Trump
supporter for years. He’s currently worth around $250 billion,
making him one of the richest people on the planet. Just today, he personally
guaranteed $40.4 billion to back the Warner Bros. Discovery bid. The Ellisons
need this deal to happen, and they need Trump’s regulators to let it happen.
Trump
has not been shy about the relationship. “They’re friends of mine. They’re big
supporters of mine,” he said in October, after the
Paramount-Skydance merger went through. “And they’ll do the right thing.”
What
does “the right thing” mean when you’re building a media empire that depends on
government approval? We might have just seen it. Trump complained about 60
Minutes on Friday. By Sunday, the critical story was dead.
I
want to be careful here. I don’t know that Trump or anyone in his
administration called the Ellisons and told them to kill the CECOT segment. I
don’t know that David Ellison called Bari Weiss and told her to spike it. There
may not have been any explicit directive at all.
But
that’s the thing about how this kind of influence works. It doesn’t require
explicit directives. Everyone involved understands the incentives. Weiss knows
who signs her checks. The Ellisons know who approves their mergers. Trump knows
that complaining publicly about coverage sends a message. The system doesn’t
need a conspiracy to function. It just needs everyone to understand what’s good
for business.
CNN reported that
“Ellison’s allies are privately arguing that he is the only buyer who would
pass muster with Trump administration regulators.” That’s a revealing detail.
The Ellisons’ competitive advantage in the Warner Bros. bidding war is their
relationship with Trump. Why would they jeopardize that relationship by airing
a segment that makes his deportation policy look like a human rights
catastrophe?
Here’s
what I keep thinking about: this is probably the last time CBS will spike a
story like this at the last minute.
Not
because they’ve learned their lesson or because the backlash will change
anything. But because they won’t need to. The dramatic, visible censorship of
killing a promoted segment hours before air is embarrassing. It generates
headlines. It makes correspondents write angry memos. It gives people like me
something to write about.
The
smarter approach is to make sure stories like this never get that far in the
first place.
This
is how censorship actually works in large institutions. It’s not a guy in a
uniform stamping “REJECTED” on your script. It’s a thousand small calculations,
made by dozens of people, about what’s worth pursuing and what isn’t. It’s a
producer deciding not to pitch an investigation because she knows it’ll never
get approved. It’s a correspondent not making certain phone calls because he’s
seen what happens to colleagues who rock the boat. It’s a desk editor quietly
steering coverage away from topics that might cause problems upstairs.
None
of this requires memos or meetings or explicit orders. It just requires a few
high-profile examples of what happens when you pursue the wrong story. The
Alfonsi situation is that example. Every journalist at CBS News now knows that
if you spend months working on a segment that makes the Trump administration
look bad, it might get killed at the last second by someone who’s never worked
in television news and who reports directly to a billionaire with business
before the administration.
What
do you think happens to the next story about immigration enforcement abuses? Or
the next investigation into deportation policy? Or any story that might
embarrass the White House at an inconvenient time?
Some
of those stories will still get pitched. Some will still get made. CBS will
still do critical coverage of the administration sometimes, if only to maintain
the pretense of independence. But the calculus has changed. The risk-reward
math is different now. And at the margins, that means stories that should get
told won’t get told. Not because anyone explicitly killed them, but because
they never got started in the first place.
That’s
the kill switch working as intended. It doesn’t just stop one segment. It
changes the entire editorial culture. It makes self-censorship so routine that
nobody even notices it’s happening.
Alfonsi’s
memo said she cares “too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled
without a fight.” According to CNN, some CBS staffers are “privately discussing
whether they can continue working under the current leadership.” Others are
“threatening to quit.”
I
don’t know how much any of that matters. Alfonsi is one correspondent. The
institution is being reshaped around her. The Ellisons have billions of dollars
and a clear vision for what they want CBS to be. Weiss has a mandate from
ownership to remake the news division. The journalists who are uncomfortable
with the direction things are going can fight, or they can leave, but they
probably can’t stop what’s happening. If they leave, they’ll be replaced with
partisans who agree with the direction Weiss is pushing the network.
And
what’s happening is the construction of something new: a media apparatus that
spans broadcast, cable, streaming, and digital, controlled by a family with
deep ties to the Trump administration, run on a day-to-day basis by someone
whose commitment to free speech has always extended exactly as far as the
interests she supports. If the Warner Bros. deal goes through, that apparatus
will also include CNN, HBO, and a portfolio of cable networks reaching tens of
millions of Americans.
The 60
Minutes that broke the Abu Ghraib story, that made powerful people
afraid of the phrase “Mike Wallace is here,” is not long for this world. Maybe
it’s already gone. What replaces it will look like 60 Minutes.
It’ll have the same theme music and the same ticking stopwatch. It might even
do good journalism sometimes, on topics that don’t threaten the interests of
ownership or the administration they depend on.
But
it won’t be the same thing. You can’t be an “investigative powerhouse,” as
Alfonsi put it, if the subjects of your investigations can veto your stories by
refusing to participate. You can’t hold
power accountable if the people who sign your checks need favors from that
power. You can’t tell the truth if telling the truth is bad for business.
Somewhere
out there, there’s a story about the next human rights abuse, the next
government scandal, the next thing the administration doesn’t want Americans to
know about. Maybe it involves CECOT. Maybe it involves something we haven’t
heard of yet. Under the old rules of journalism, a network like CBS might have
pursued that story, taken the heat, and trusted that the audience would reward
them for it.
Under
the new rules, that story probably won’t get pitched. And if it does get
pitched, it won’t get approved. And if it somehow does get approved, it’ll get
killed before it airs, just like the CECOT segment, because somebody upstairs
will decide it’s not worth the trouble.
That’s
the kill switch. It’s working perfectly.
