On Sunday, CBS’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened as usual with the tick-tick-tick of its title sequence, a sound with Pavlovian resonance for millions of Boomers who have watched the show for most of their adult lives. This time the tick-tick-tick might as well have been a time bomb. Hours before the show aired, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled a story about the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of immigrants to CECOT, a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador. CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the story, said Weiss’s decision was “political” rather than “editorial,” and that Weiss was trying to “shield an administration” from critique. “We are trading 50 years of ‘Gold Standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet,” Alfonsi wrote in a memo to colleagues, before declaring that she would fight to maintain 60 Minutes’s good name.
The segment leaked anyway, thanks to Global TV, which carries 60 Minutes in Canada and apparently failed to remove the segment from its streaming line-up. I have now watched it and have read the dueling memos written by Alfonsi and, earlier, Weiss about the segment. Global TV may have been merely careless in letting the segment out, but since they are Canadian, I would not rule out treachery, and an effort to make Americans and their media look silly, no matter their political views.
The segment itself did not leave me salivating for more 60 Minutes reporting. It relied heavily on the testimony of a single Venezuelan deportee, Luis Muñoz Pinto, who described beatings, blood, vomit, pummeling of the genitals, and promises from Salvadoran prison officials that he would die there. These claims align with previous inmate accounts. The deportee is now in Colombia, and his story is buttressed by interviews with researchers and activists. The most dramatic and repulsive footage is from inside CECOT itself. The prisoners are shaved, given white pajamas, and warehoused in enormous rooms. They look like they have not seen daylight for a long time. Their pale faces peering through the bars resemble those of the expendable War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road.
The problem with the segment is that many of the images it uses were released in March, not by some intrepid human-rights investigator but by El Salvador and by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, after her visit to CECOT. The previous reports came from Human Rights Watch and The New York Times, among others, and as Weiss complains in her memo, 60 Minutes will fail to “advance” the story of these “horrible conditions” if it simply repeats allegations already made, or indeed shows footage released with diabolical pride by the administration itself.
Weiss’s main demand was that the segment’s producers try harder to get administration officials on camera to explain why sending random tattooed Latinos to a gulag is in America’s interest. The administration had ignored Alfonsi and her team’s requests. Weiss suggested contacting Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller or border czar Tom Homan, both known talkers, and sent their phone numbers. She even suggested how Alfonsi might set the interview up, by bringing up all the blood and beatings and puke and asking Miller and Homan whether they feel even a tinge of remorse for having overseen this program.
“Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story,” Alfonsi wrote in her memo. “We have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” Handing Stephen Miller anything that could be described as a “kill switch” sounds very bad. But in the memo, Weiss merely proposed to hand him a microphone, and get him to defend the “torture” that CBS’s reporting had “revealed.” The memo does not say the segment should never run. It says that it needs more confrontation and drama, which is to say more of what Weiss was brought in to CBS three months ago to provide.
“Putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself,” Weiss wrote in her memo, with what I think was insincere praise. No one turns on CBS, or any other channel, to read or watch “the public record.” They turn it on to see anger, hatred, uncertainty, and conflict. For as long as 60 Minutes has existed, it has relied on these elements just as surely as the National Football League games that preceded it relied on some doubt over which team would win. In fact the tense but contrived interview with an administration official would have, in past seasons, been the very stuff of 60 Minutes’s popularity. It would have furnished CBS clips of (say) Steve Kroft, narrowing his eyes and asking grave questions of a powerful man, in close up and with a glistening scalp.
Weiss’s intervention in the story was dramatic in its own bad way. Her underlings at CBS have all-but-openly denigrated her, and however reasonable her memo might have been, it evidently caused many of her employees to infer sinister motives. And 60 Minutes is, among news programs, one of the most patiently and slowly reported, so for a segment to undergo enormous changes at the last minute must feel unpleasant and invasive. CBS veteran Scott Pelley reportedly scolded Weiss for not giving her editorial advice earlier, after one of the several previous cuts of the segment. “It’s not a part-time job,” Pelley said, according to The New York Times. Staffers are not used to having segments delayed in the final hours, least of all by a 41-year-old upstart richer and more successful than they are. Bosses need to know when their edits are unwelcome, and when their takeovers feel hostile. Weiss’s drama-detector, so refined when seeking out news stories, seems to have failed her when avoiding it in her own newsroom.
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