The famed '60 Minutes' show by American broadcaster CBS News has suffered a hit to its credibility, with the outlet's own employees threatening to quit over the shelving of a programme on the Trump administration's immigration policies.
CBS News on Sunday pulled a '60 Minutes' report featuring the accounts of Venezuelan men deported by the Donald Trump administration to the maximum security CECOT prison in El Salvador hours before its scheduled broadcast, giving few reasons for the sudden decision.
In an editor's note posted on X, the programme wrote, "The broadcast lineup for tonight's edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report 'Inside CECOT' will air in a future broadcast."
Citing two people with knowledge of the matter, NPR reported that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told her colleagues this weekend that the Inside CECOT report could not run without an on-the-record comment from a Trump administration official.
"We determined it needed additional reporting," CBS News also said on Sunday, as per CNN.
The announcement on social media, meanwhile, was met with severe backlash, with netizens declaring that CBS News, under Weiss, had just become a mouthpiece for the Trump administration.
While netizens raged about the sudden rescheduling, the correspondent who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote in an internal memo that Weiss had "spiked" the Inside CECOT story, despite it being cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.
"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," wrote Alfonsi in the internal communication, which was widely shared by journalists and other users on social media.
Alfonsi went on to say that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the White House, and the US State Department all responded with silence when contacted for interviews, saying, "Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical manoeuvre designed to kill the story."
"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," the CBS correspondent flatly said.
Noting that the Venezuelan deportees "risked their lives" to speak to 60 Minutes, Alfonsi said that the programme had a moral and professional duty to its sources.
"Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless," Alfonsi said, adding, “We have been promoting this story on social media for days. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify it as corporate corporate censorship.”
"I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight," the CBS News correspondent concluded.
First aired in 1968, '60 Minutes' was ranked among Variety's list of the greatest TV shows of all time in 2023, and has been hailed as one of the most esteemed news magazine broadcasts on American television.
As CBS News became the talking point on Sunday, CNN also reported that the news programme's staffers were threatening to resign over the censorship allegations.
Brian Stelter, the media analyst for CNN, said in a post on X, “Inside 60 Minutes, where journalistic independence is sacrosanct, ‘people are threatening to quit over this,’ I'm told."