The “60 Minutes” segment that CBS News’ Bari Weiss pulled from a Sunday night U.S. broadcast went public on Monday after an unedited version of Sunday’s episode mistakenly aired on the streaming platform of Canada’s Global TV, TheWrap has learned — even as the original version aired on TV screens.
Weiss pulled the “Inside CECOT” segment, which promised to unveil the “brutal and torturous conditions” Venezuelan migrants endured after the Trump administration deported them to a mega prison in El Salvador, hours before its U.S. debut on Sunday over concerns that the story “wasn’t ready” because it lacked on-record administration voices and needed more reporting.
While CBS News also pulled the fully edited, nearly 14-minute segment, anchored by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi and produced by Oriana Zill de Granados, from its international partners, the unaired version appeared to air on the show’s Canadian distributor Global TV’ streaming platform.
Clips of the segment circulated online on Monday.
In it, Alfonsi said she interviewed multiple men about the “torture, sexual and physical abuse” and “four months of hell” they endured after their deportation from the U.S. to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Alfonsi also walked through a report from the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch and spoke to the director of UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who sought asylum, told Alfonsi about his experience after he was forcibly removed from the U.S.
Alfonsi noted that the Department of Homeland Security declined a request for an interview “and referred our questions to El Salvador.”
“The government there did not respond to our request,” Alfonsi said.
According to Axios, “a source familiar with ’60 Minutes’ correspondence with the administration” said CBS News did receive comments from “the White House, State Department and DHS.”
CBS News did not respond to an immediate request for comment on the aired segment and what specific issues existed with the edited version. Paramount, CBS News’ parent company, has pulled the segment from YouTube accounts on copyright grounds.
Alfonsi told “60 Minutes” colleagues on Sunday that the federal agencies she reached out to declined to comment, making Weiss’ choice “not an editorial decision” but “a political one.” “60 Minutes” executive producer Tanya Simon told staffers on Monday that Weiss “had a different vision for how the piece should be” despite its clearing by the network’s standards department and lawyers.
Critics have accused Weiss and David Ellison, Paramount’s CEO, of making the decision to appease President Donald Trump, who last week said “60 Minutes” has treated him “far worse“ under Ellison’s leadership.
Ellison, who appointed Weiss as CBS News’ top editor in October upon his $150 million purchase of the Free Press, will need federal regulatory approval for his company’s hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Weiss and CBS News have said the network still intends to air the segment, and she said to staffers during an editorial call on Monday that it featured “very powerful testimony of abuse at CECOT.”
“But that testimony has already been reported on by places like the Times,” Weiss said. “The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment in this prison. So to run a story on this subject, two months later, we simply need to do more.”
“Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom,” she continued. “I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
