CBS News is reportedly set to air its “60 Minutes” report on the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador Sunday night, per reporting Sunday from CNN’s Brian Stelter, albeit after getting snubbed by Trump administration officials when asked for comment.
Last month, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss controversially pulled the report just hours before it was set to air, a decision that Weiss didn’t realize “would be a big deal,” a nod to her “TV inexperience,” Stelter wrote.
The report’s focus was on migrants that had been deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notoriously violent and deadly prison, but was canned by Weiss because it lacked on-camera interviews with members of the Trump administration.
To remedy her grievances with the report, Weiss signed off on flying several CBS News producers to Washington, D.C. to arrange interviews with members of the Trump administration.
“But the promised interview did not materialize,” Stelter wrote, citing two sources who spoke with CNN under the condition of anonymity. “Everyone went home empty-handed.”
When Weiss first axed the report last month, it had been fully vetted by CBS News’ legal team and ready for airing. Weiss’ decision was so late in the process that CBS News had already shared a copy of the report with a Canadian network authorized to air “60 Minutes,” which ended up broadcasting the report and stunning media analysts and critics.
Furthermore, the broadcast of the report in its original form last month will allow media critics to “compare the original report to the Weiss-approved version that airs tonight,” Stelter wrote.
The Trump administration has sent around 250 migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison as part of its broader mass deportation policy. The New York Times spoke with 40 former inmates of CECOT back in November who recounted what they described as the prison’s “institutional policy and practice of torture.”