What Bari Weiss Got Right

On Sunday, CBS’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes , opened as usual with the tick-tick-tick of its title sequence, a sound with Pavlovian resonance for millions of Boomers who have watched the show for most of their adult lives. This time the tick-tick-tick might as well have been a time bomb. Hours before the show aired, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled a story about the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of immigrants to CECOT, a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador. CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the story, said Weiss’s decision was “political” rather than “editorial,” and that Weiss was trying to “shield an administration” from critique. “We are trading 50 years of ‘Gold Standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet,” Alfonsi wrote in a memo to colleagues, before declaring that she would fight to maintain 60 Minutes ’s good name. The segment leaked anyway, thanks to Global TV, which carries 60 Minutes in Canada and apparently failed to remove the segment from its streaming line-up. I have now watched it and have read the dueling memos written by Alfonsi and, earlier, Weiss about the segment. Global TV may have been merely careless in letting the segment out, but since they are Canadian, I would not rule out treachery, and an effort to make Americans and their media look silly, no matter their political views. The segment itself did not leave me salivating for more 60 Minutes reporting. It relied heavily on the testimony of a single Venezuelan deportee, Luis Muñoz Pinto, who described beatings, blood, vomit, pummeling of the genitals, and promises from Salvadoran prison officials that he would die there. These claims align with previous inmate accounts. The deportee is now in Colombia, and his story is buttressed by interviews with researchers and activists. The most dramatic and repulsive footage is from inside CECOT itself. The prisoners are shaved, given white pajamas, and warehoused in enormous rooms. They look like they have not seen daylight for a long time. Their pale faces peering through the bars resemble those of the expendable War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road . The problem with the segment is that many of the images it uses were released in March, not by some intrepid human-rights investigator but by El Salvador and by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem , after her visit to CECOT. The previous reports came from Human Rights Watch and The New York Times , among others, and as Weiss complains in her memo, 60 Minutes will fail to “advance” the story of these “horrible conditions” if it simply repeats allegations already made, or indeed shows footage released with diabolical pride by the administration itself. Weiss’s main demand was that the segment’s producers try harder to get administration officials on camera to explain why sending random tattooed Latinos to a gulag is in America’s interest. The administration had ignored Alfonsi and her team’s requests. Weiss suggested contacting Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller or border czar Tom...

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