Only three hours before it was set to be broadcast Sunday night, a “60 Minutes” report on the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, used by the Trump administration to detain migrants from Venezuela, was blocked by the new pro-Trump executive in charge of CBS News, Bari Weiss.
This act of blatant censorship outraged the staff of the long-running program. The reporter who narrated the segment and interviewed survivors of the torture, Sharyn Alfonsi, sent out an internal memo Sunday blasting the decision as “corporate censorship” and a “betrayal” of sources who had “risked their lives” to testify about conditions in the prison.
A bootleg copy of the program segment has been made available by a Canadian journalist, though it and other versions posted were subsequently taken down, evidently by YouTube, which is owned by Google. The content makes clear why it was pulled, as it demonstrates the direct responsibility of the US government for the torture of prisoners, including regular violent beatings, sexual assault and brutal conditions.
Most of the immigrants had no criminal record and were not gang members, despite the incessant slanders from Trump, Stephen Miller and other fascists in the White House.
CECOT was the location where the Department of Homeland Security, in violation of a court order, sent more than 200 detained migrants, most of them Venezuelan, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland construction worker married to a US citizen and father to three US citizen children. Garcia was returned to the United States under court order and was released last week, pending further efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport him.
The leaked version of the “60 Minutes” segment is devastating. The courage of the men who testified is remarkable, as is the compassion of the students and human rights advocates who helped them, and the determination of Alfonsi and her team of journalists to bring this information to the public. The segment exposes the blatant lying and inhuman callousness of the Trump administration, particularly Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who traveled to El Salvador soon after the Venezuelans were imprisoned there to make television appearances on the supposed success of Trump’s anti-migrant policy.
In her internal email protesting the decision to cancel the “60 Minutes” broadcast, later leaked to the media, Alfonsi wrote, “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 particularly objected to the insistence by Weiss that the segment on CECOT must include an on-camera response from Stephen Miller or another top Trump administration spokesman on the deportation campaign. (Weiss actually supplied Miller’s contact details to the “60 Minutes” team). Alfonsi pointed out that the network had sought interviews with the White House, Department of Homeland Security and State Department, only to be rebuffed.
“Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story,” she wrote. “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. … Government silence is a statement, not a VETO…
“If the standard for airing a story is that ‘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.”
Weiss gave only the lamest justification to network staff after killing the broadcast, claiming it was only a delay to do more reporting, and promising the story would eventually run on “60 Minutes.” In a newsroom call at 9 a.m. Monday—leaked to other media outlets and then released by CBS—Weiss claimed that there was nothing new in the segment compared to reporting several months ago by the New York Times.
This is an outright lie, since the “60 Minutes” segment incorporates the findings of a Human Rights Watch report issued in November, which extensively documented torture at CECOT. Both the testimony of the former prisoners, and the evidence uncovered by a student team of human rights researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are new and important.
Weiss did not explain why the network had been promoting the segment on Friday, after five separate reviews by corporate lawyers and executives, only to abruptly cancel it and run a different segment in its place. But it is clear that the story was killed after the Trump White House reacted with hostility to the announcement Friday of the impending broadcast.
Although the exact details of the censorship order are not yet known, the new owner of CBS, David Ellison, is the son of mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and a heavy backer of Trump. The Ellisons installed Weiss as editor-in-chief in October, in large measure to ensure a right-wing, pro-Trump and pro-Israel slant to the network. They also purchased Weiss’s stridently Zionist internet publication, The Free Press, for $150 million, a staggering sum for her, but pocket change for Ellison, whose fortune is estimated at $238 billion, making him the fifth-richest oligarch on the planet.
One of Weiss’s first major actions as editor-in-chief was to host an hour-long broadcast Town Hall in which she fawned over Erika Kirk, CEO of the fascist Turning Point USA organization, and widow of Charlie Kirk, the group’s founder, who was assassinated in September.
The suppression of the “60 Minutes” broadcast on CECOT thus represents the intersection of the main reactionary tendencies in American social and political life: the rise of the financial oligarchy, which comprises the social basis of the Trump administration; the attack on democratic rights, in the form of outright censorship of the media by the corporate overlords; the “anything goes” violent repression against immigrants; and the cultivation of outright fascists by the corporate elite and the capitalist state.
This anti-immigrant rampage has been entirely bipartisan. Trump and Democrat Joe Biden both subcontracted some of the dirtiest anti-immigrant work to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose police-state regime built the CECOT prison in 2022 as part of a US-supported “anti-gang” campaign. Over the five years from 2020 through 2024—the last year of Trump’s first term and the four years of the Biden administration—the US government supplied nearly $1 billion in aid to the tiny country, largely focused on preventing Salvadoran immigration to the United States.
While the censorship of “60 Minutes” is particularly glaring, the corporate media is more and more directly subordinated to the social and financial interests of various oligarchs. Of the five major broadcast and cable networks, two are run by ultra-right billionaires, Ellison and Murdoch, and three by giant corporations, Disney, Comcast and Time-Warner. There will be further concentration of ownership once the contest is resolved over control of Time-Warner, which owns CNN. Netflix made the initial winning takeover bid, but is now being challenged by Paramount, the media vehicle of the Ellisons.
At the same time, Murdoch and fellow oligarch Jeff Bezos own two of the three most influential daily newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The New York Times, the house organ of the Democratic Party, is also a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, but still owned by the Sulzberger family, who are “only” centi-millionaires.
The domination of giant corporations and the billionaire families who control them is the fundamental source of the attacks on democratic rights faced by the entire working class. As the WSWS has emphasized, the return to power of Trump and the ongoing effort to establish a fascist dictatorship in America means that the political forms of rule are being brought into line with the underlying social reality. It is impossible to maintain even the pretense of democracy in a society riven by such massive economic and social inequality.
The censorship of “60 Minutes” underscores the critical importance of the working class gaining access to the information needed to develop a clear understanding of the capitalist crisis and the dangers that it poses. In this, the role of the World Socialist Web Site is critical. The socialist press develops through the tireless exposure of the capitalist system and the struggle to educate workers and young people in the lessons of history, science and the class struggle. It is the spearhead of the struggle to build a mass revolutionary party of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist program.
Through its latest initiative, Socialism AI, the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International seek to give access to the theoretical heritage of the Marxist-Trotskyist movement to the ever-wider layers of workers and youth who are looking for a genuine socialist alternative to poverty, dictatorship and war.