Earlier this week, it was announced that CBS had decided to shelve a 60 Minutes segment on Trump’s deportation of illegal immigrants to an El Salvador prison.
This was the last thing Trump needed to be blasted out on TV, so there was likely a sigh of relief when the announcement was made.
However, we just learned that the segment aired in Canada, and now it is blowing up all over the Internet.
Trump has been getting put through the wringer by the judiciary, media, and Democrats even since he decided to send a group of illegal immigrants to a prison in El Salvador.
For example, Judge James Boasberg had ordered the administration to turn the planes around, but the administration ignored the order. This is something Trump continues to deal with in litigation.
The Guardian had also issued a report on the deportations, claiming the prisoners were tortured after arriving at the prison.
The report started, “More than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention, according to a report published on Wednesday.”
60 Minutes had planned to air a segment on the CECOT prison in El Salvador this weekend, but CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss shut it down over concerns of bias.
This drew sharp criticism, including from Democrats (more on that in the next section), as well as correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. She claimed the deportees have endured "four months of hell," adding that the deportees have been assaulted, degraded by the guards, and forced to live in disgusting conditions.
Weiss sent out a memo to staffers explaining why she pulled the report, basically calling out everyone for not providing the proper context of the administration’s position. In other words, she was demanding fair coverage, not slanted coverage.
But then the video was leaked in Canada, with nearly 14 minutes of the segment being shown. As noted above, this is not a good look for the administration because of the biased nature of the report.
Honestly, it was refreshing to see legacy media leadership call out journalists for presenting a clearly slanted piece, but Democrats did not see it that way.
For example, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) went ballistic after the report was shelved, stating, “But right now, you know, because of the sort of muscle that Trump is using over the FCC to control mergers and to extract particular points of concession from different broadcast networks, he’s gaining real control over a lot of them and others he’s gaining control over through different kinds of coercive manipulations.”
He later added, “So it would take some shareholders of the different companies to begin to raise the issue, and it will take other truly independent media entities, such as your own, blowing the whistle on this. And maybe, you know, that would shame or humiliate someone like Bari Weiss into acting like, you know, a real journalist as opposed to, you know, a reporter on the payroll of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. And that’s basically what’s going on right now. They are acting like state-controlled TV entities that are part of an inside power operation.”
I have called out the administration for sticking its nose where I don’t think it belongs in regard to media content, but that was not the case here. The decision was made by network leadership, and having read the memo from Weiss, I think her points were well taken. You can definitely present the negatives, but you also need to give the other side a fair shake, which is how I took Weiss’ memo.
