In 1995, 60 Minutes made a decision that nearly destroyed the program. Producers killed an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco industry whistleblower who had evidence that cigarette companies knew their products were addictive and carcinogenic. CBS’s lawyers were worried about a potential lawsuit, so the interview got shelved. The story eventually came out anyway, the lawyers’ fears proved overblown, and 60 Minutes spent years trying to rebuild its credibility. The whole debacle became the basis for The Insider, a 1999 film starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino that portrayed CBS executives as cowards who caved to corporate pressure at the expense of the public interest.

It was, by any measure, a low point in the history of American broadcast journalism.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent an internal memo to colleagues warning that CBS was repeating that history. The network had just killed her story about Venezuelan migrants who were deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, where they were allegedly tortured, beaten, and subjected to sexual violence. The segment had been promoted on social media for days. It had been screened five times. It had been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and its Standards and Practices division. It was, by all accounts, ready to air.

Then Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, pulled it.

“CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast,” Alfonsi wrote in her memo. “It took years to recover from that ‘low point.’ By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.”

That distinction matters. In 1995, CBS killed a story because executives were afraid of getting sued. It was cowardly, but at least there was a concrete fear driving the decision. In 2025, CBS killed a story because the Trump administration declined to comment on it.

That’s the official explanation, anyway. And if that standard holds, American journalism is in serious trouble.

Let me walk through the timeline here, because the speed of it is remarkable.

On Friday morning, CBS sent out a press release promoting the upcoming segment. “Inside CECOT,” it was called. The network described it as a look at “one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons,” featuring interviews with recently released deportees who would describe “the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.” CBS ran promotional clips on the air and on social media. The 60 Minutes website had a page up for the segment.

On Friday night, Donald Trump held a rally in North Carolina. He complained about 60 Minutes, saying the program had “treated me worse under the new ownership” and that if the Ellisons, who now control CBS’s parent company, “are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

On Saturday morning, Weiss weighed in with concerns about the segment. According to CNN’s reporting, she took issue with the lack of an on-camera response from the Trump administration. She suggested the segment needed an interview with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and provided his contact information to 60 Minutes staff.

By Sunday afternoon, the story was dead. CBS posted on social media that the segment would “air in a future broadcast.” The promotional page was taken down. The clips were removed from YouTube. A CBS spokesperson told reporters the segment “needed additional reporting.”

Alfonsi wasn’t having it. In her memo, she wrote that she and her producer had asked for a call with Weiss to discuss the decision. Weiss “did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.”

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote. “It is factually correct. 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 went further. The segment’s reporters had reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and the State Department for comment. None of them responded. According to Alfonsi, this silence was strategic.

“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” she wrote. “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. 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.”

That phrase, “kill switch,” is the right way to think about what just happened. If the new standard at CBS News is that critical stories about the government can’t air unless the government agrees to participate, then the government has been given the power to suppress any coverage it doesn’t like. All officials have to do is refuse to engage. No comment becomes a veto.

Think about what this standard would have meant historically. No Pentagon Papers coverage, since the Nixon administration certainly wasn’t going to sit for an interview about it. No Abu Ghraib reporting, since the Bush administration didn’t exactly want to chat about torture photos. No Watergate, unless the burglars agreed to go on camera. The entire history of adversarial journalism depends on the premise that reporters can publish true, well-sourced information even when the subjects of that information would prefer they didn’t. What Weiss has done is abandon that premise.

Bari Weiss has spent years building a brand as a defender of free expression and a critic of censorship in mainstream institutions.

In 2020, she resigned from the New York Times with a public letter accusing her colleagues of fostering an “illiberal environment” where certain viewpoints were suppressed. She went on to co-found The Free Press, a publication that positioned itself as a corrective to mainstream media’s alleged ideological blind........

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