As you may know, the new CBS editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, reportedly blocked a planned 60 Minutes segment on US deportation of Venezuelans to a notoriously cruel Salvadorn prison just three hours before it was to air in the United States yesterday. In closely related news, the CBS parent company, Paramount Skydance, bought both CBS and Weiss’s (ironically named) site The Free Press a few months ago and is seeking to curry favor with the Trump Administration as it pursues yet an additional huge merger with the media company Warner Brothers Discovery.
The segment was recorded and shared when it aired on Canada’s Global TV, which has the rights to broadcast 60 Minutes. Here’s the Substack post that in turn provides the video link:
https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment
Three things struck me about the segment:
1. As disturbing as it is, the reporting actually takes a milder tone than I expected. It doesn’t begin to cover all the ground about how horrible this Salvadoran detention center is and how horrible the other deportations (including to third countries the deportees have nothing to do with) are.
2. Some of the disturbing footage is that apparently provided by the detention facility itself.
3. The video is being circulated in ways analagous to how forbidden news might have been circulated behind the Iron Curtain from the mid-1940s through the 1980s – in other words, for Putin and Trump, the good old days.
Is this the end of free jouranlism by network news. They already censors themselves so much and don’t cove vital stories. Bari Weiss needs to resign and eveyone should go on their facebook page and emand it.
Thank you.