The Trump White House offered CBS News’ 60 Minutes an off-topic statement for its segment on the Salvadoran megaprison CECOT.
Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, and her producer requested an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in late November. She did not hear back, according to the New York Times.
Journalists at 60 Minutes also attempted to get statements from the White House, DHS, and the State Department for the segment.
As the team at 60 Minutes finalized the segment last week, the White House provided CBS with a statement on Thursday, which did not reference CECOT—the focus of the 60 Minutes segment.
“60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are [sic] removing from the country,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in the statement.
That statement did not make the air, but CBS News did include a video clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the administration’s immigration policy at a March press briefing, in which she claimed those being deported were “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable.”
The segment also included a clip of President Donald Trump praising El Salvador for its cruel prison conditions.
The segment was pulled from the air by CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss just hours before it was set to run. It exposed the harsh and cruel conditions of Venezuelan deportees who had been sent to El Salvador earlier this year.
The segment did, however, air in Canada and spread quickly on social media afterwards. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) amplified the clip on his YouTube account.
In her reasoning for pulling the segment, Weiss claimed that it had flawed and incomplete reporting. She also claimed that administration officials need to be on camera to give statements. Weiss recommended that the 60 Minutes team get an on-camera interview with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the mastermind behind much of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
“We need to push much harder to get these principals on the record,” she wrote in an internal memo to 60 Minutes producers.
During the segment, Alfonsi notes to viewers that DHS “declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador.”
Weiss’s decision to pull the segment has embroiled CBS News and its signature news program in controversy for days.
Notably, Alfonsi interpreted Weiss’s decision as political and as an attempt by CBS to please the Trump administration.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote to her CBS colleagues. “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.”
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