Bari Weiss’ ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT Fiasco: EIC ‘Readily Realizes and Admits’ Missteps

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss realized she needs to work on “having more executive discipline” following her hasty move to pull a “60 Minutes” segment from the air, The New Yorker reported Monday.

Of the fallout around the last-minute decision to pull a segment on Venezuelan deportees last month, sources told the magazine that The Free Press founder “readily realizes and admits that she was not as knowledgeable as she should have been about the timing of the marketing and promo process at ‘60 Minutes.’”

“She brings the sometimes chaotic energy and work ethic of a startup, but she also realizes she needs to work on having more executive discipline,” the unidentified individual said.

Late last December, Weiss pulled a segment on the Trump administration deporting hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a megaprison in El Salvador, titled “Inside CECOT.” The episode promised to reveal the “brutal and torturous conditions” inside El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, featuring interviews from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.

Three hours before air — after the segment had already been promoted — Weiss decided to pull the story, holding for on-the-record input from the Trump administration, which to that point had been denied.

“My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” Weiss said at the time. “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.”

The segment finally aired Sunday night after nearly a month of holdup and editorial review, still without the administration on record. The delay prompted internal friction at CBS News. Alfonsi alleged “corporate censorship” in a Dec. 21 internal memo, stating that the segment had already been fact-checked, legally vetted and delivered to a Canadian broadcaster that re-airs “60 Minutes.”

Weiss and producers personally sought interviews with the Trump administration, specifically with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or border czar Tom Homan, but none was granted.

“Since November, ‘60 Minutes’ has made several attempts to interview key Trump administration officials on camera about our story,” Alfonsi said in a new intro. “They declined our requests.”

The New Yorker also reported Monday that Weiss seemed “wedded to the idea of news coverage as a contest of ideas, in which both sides of the debate are equally valid … at a time when the Trump Administration is routinely lying to the public and straining to justify blatant abuses of executive power.” But privately, she expressed “alarm at many of the Administration’s actions.”

Weiss’s four-month tenure at CBS News has been off to a rocky start. Despite never working in broadcast journalism, Paramount CEO David Ellison appointed Weiss to the newly created editor-in-chief role in October after the CBS-parent company acquired Weiss’s right-leaning site, The Free Press.

Weiss and newly minted “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil have been criticized for catering to the Trump administration in their coverage.

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