Is CBS News censoring 60 Minutes?

Is CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss censoring critical coverage of the Trump administration to please the network’s billionaire backers and the president himself?

It’s the crisis many have anticipated since Weiss — a center-right provocateur known for her outspoken criticism of “wokeness” and support for Israel — was appointed atop CBS News in October. And now it’s here.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes was set to air a report on conditions in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has sent migrants. But Saturday night, Weiss intervened to spike the story, declaring it was not “ready” for publication. 

A flurry of leaks then ensued, including an internal email from Sharyn Alfonsi, a correspondent on the story. Alfonsi asserted it had been fully reviewed and approved by the network’s standards and legal team, and that Weiss’s move was therefore “political,” “a betrayal,” and “corporate censorship.”

Weiss’s own internal explanation then leaked: She insisted both that there was not enough new in the report and insisted it should include Trump officials giving an on-camera interview. “I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” she told the New York Times in a statement. Other criticisms she’d made internally about the piece were later leaked to Axios, and they boiled down to: not enough was done to explain the administration’s point of view.

Behind Weiss’s move, her critics suspect, is an effort to please Larry and David Ellison, the father-and-son billionaires who helped purchase CBS’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year. The Ellisons subsequently bought Weiss’s publication, the Free Press, making her very rich, and installed her atop a pillar of the mainstream media despite her lack of any experience in TV news.

The Ellisons are hoping the Trump administration will intervene to help them pull off another media mega-deal. The problem is that President Donald Trump has been very vocal about his unhappiness with 60 Minutes’s recent coverage of his administration — he’s insisted it’s gotten worse since the Ellisons took it over. The implied quid pro quo seems obvious: shape coverage of Trump more to his liking, or say goodbye to your media mega-deal. 

Yet there’s also a throughline that connects Weiss’s behavior here with her longstanding editorial line toward Trump — epitomized in the approach of the Free Press. That publication frequently runs criticisms of the Trump administration. But, typically, it tries to make sure it is done in a delicate and careful way, with sensitivity toward how its right-wing audience would receive it and care not to trigger them.

That is, when it comes to Trump, Weiss has long tried hard to be “politically correct.”

The billionaires behind the curtain

Let’s start by paying attention to the billionaires behind the curtain.

Larry Ellison has long supported Trump, and he and his son currently want the Trump administration to use antitrust review to scuttle Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, so they can combine WB with Paramount to create an entertainment and media powerhouse. 

But Trump is no cheap date. He’s making his price clear. 

On December 8, Trump complained on Truth Social that 60 Minutes aired an interview in which his onetime ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) criticized him. But he clarified that his “real problem with the show” wasn’t Greene, it was that ‘the new ownership” would even “allow a show like this to air.” He continued: “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP… Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”

He reiterated that complaint in another post Tuesday: “For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

Anonymously sourced reports from Trumpworld soon suggested that the Ellisons’ hopes for federal intervention may be in vain. And a fund that had supported the Ellisons’ bid — Affinity Partners, run by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — pulled out from the deal last week.

At a rally on Friday, Trump complained about 60 Minutes again, saying they’ve “treated me worse under the new ownership,” and that “they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”

The next day, on Saturday, Weiss decided to spike the CECOT story, which was set to air Sunday.

Bari Weiss’s political correctness toward Trump

Yet it isn’t exactly surprising that Weiss would be skeptical about a hard-hitting investigative report into the Trump administration’s abuses.

The Free Press is distinguished by its opposition to “wokeness” and its staunch support of Israel. But in contrast to other center-right publications that distinguished themselves from their more conservative brethren by criticizing Trump, Weiss’s Free Press was, at the very least, Trump-curious.

To be sure, the Free Press ran criticism of Trump. But Weiss criticized what she called the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction” to Trump in his first term, particularly scorning claims that he was a budding authoritarian. In fact, it was Trump’s critics, she said, who often proved “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian.”

So, in contrast to the Free Press’s hair-on-fire coverage of leftists on campus, the publication took a notably measured tone toward Trump’s second term. One go-to move for when the administration did something that was widely viewed as outrageous or terrible was to convene an expert roundtable — get some critics in there as well as some Trump supporters, and let the readers decide.

Trump was not, so far as we know, reading the Free Press. But the anti-woke audience Weiss was cultivating was full of Trump supporters, and to keep them subscribing, Weiss had to ensure the Free Press never became viewed as overtly anti-Trump, even after Trump regained office and began imposing a hardline agenda.

Some commentators who liked Weiss’s anti-wokeness takes were appalled by this turn. “The almost total avoidance of coverage of the current government threats to freedoms as basic as habeas corpus, due process and free speech on campus is quite something,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, adding: “When there is coverage, it’s nitpicking in order to defend Trump.”

We don’t actually know what the CBS News CECOT report contains. But it is common for investigative journalists to take an adversarial approach to the people in power — to expose abuses by them and try to hold them to account. In Alfonsi’s email, she framed her CECOT story as “giving voice to the voiceless.” Weiss’s longtime critique, though, is that she believes mainstream journalistic institutions became too adversarial and reflexively hostile to Donald Trump. 

Before Weiss founded the Free Press, she was a mid-level editor at the New York Times’s opinion section. But in summer 2020, she publicly posted her “Resignation Letter,” blasting the paper for what she said was progressive groupthink and a culture hostile to conservative or even centrist views.

In the letter, she complained that on certain topics, “self-censorship” had become “the norm” at the paper. She complained that politically sensitive pieces were treated according to a different set of rules and standards, and that they could run “only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.”

This sounds like what Weiss is doing right now. Some of the criticisms she’s made of the CECOT story — that it doesn’t have on-camera interviews with Trump officials and doesn’t break enough news — sound strained, unconvincing, and unlikely to be the true reason for this high-profile last-minute intervention. 

Rather, Weiss saw a torrent of criticism from the right (and, plausibly, Trump himself) headed her way, made an awkward intervention to try to prevent it from happening, and consequently created a far greater uproar.