Bari Weiss might be guilty of making CBS News and 60 Minutes perform journalism...

Refusing to include comment from the administration you are accusing of being complicit in torture is bad practice.

The furor over the decision by Bari Weiss to pull a 60 Minutes segment this past weekend happened while most people were tuning out news and focusing on Christmas. The segment was a profile on the CECOT prison in El Salvador that the Trump administration had been using to send prisoners to for most of this year.

The decision to pull the story is being denounced as censorship, as bending the knee, as CBS and its parent company Paramount kissing up to the Trump administration.

Let’s define some terms here though because it is important to understand what we are talking about. This story wasn’t spiked, which would mean it is a dead story never to see the light of day, it was pulled and that is a big difference.

When a story is pulled from a TV show or newspaper, it can and likely will run at a later date after it has been fixed.

Context matters and once again a major media outlet failed…

As usual, what I’ll try to do here is present you with the facts and some vital context and let you decide. Because once again, the narrative you are being fed by most media outlets isn’t accurate.

In fact, I’d argue that any journalist not blinded by hatred for Donald Trump and instead looking objectively at the facts, would look at what Bari Weiss did and come to the conclusion that she is right.

That’s the conclusion I drew from watching the full piece which is quickly being pulled from online postings. The version I watched had been posted by Democrat Cory Booker and viewed more than 2 million times when I saw it but YouTube flagged it as a copyright violation.

As I write, you can still view it in less than optimal form here.

Having watched the story, read the email from Alfonsi to her colleagues, the memo from Weiss and various media reports, Weiss isn’t just pointing out this story isn’t ready, she’s pointing out that it is lazy journalism and the public deserves better.

If the story doesn’t air it will be due to Sharyn Alfonsi…

This story, now that it has been leaked out and viewed millions of times on YouTube may not air on 60 minutes at this point, but if so, it will because of the leak, and quite possibly the reaction of the journalist behind the story Sharyn Alfonsi.

In an internal email to staff, Alfonsi decried the decision to pull the story as “corporate censorship.”

Here’s something Alfonsi, a veteran in this business should already understand. When you publish on somebody else’s platform, they get to have a say in your work and in the eyes of Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief at CBS, this story wasn’t ready.

There is nothing new in this story, it doesn’t break any new ground compared to the wide ranging reporting on this very issue more than a month ago now. It’s a series of allegations of torture by men who were imprisoned in CECOT after being deported by the Trump administration. They are all free now, released to Venezuela this past summer in a prisoner exchange for 10 Americans who were held in Venezuela.

That fact alone makes this story odd. Why run it? What does this story add that hasn’t already been reported everywhere else extensively?

The major problem with the story though is the lack of comment from the Trump administration to the very serious charges being levelled.

Here’s what Alfonsi said in her story:

“The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.”

That was at the 12:43 second mark in a piece that runs 13:30. We’ve already heard extensively from the men who were imprisoned, from activists opposed to the deportations and from a group of students at a Berkeley human rights group trying to prove the government wrong.

There was nothing new from any part of the Trump administration responding to the claims, and if you listen to Alfonsi, they refused to comment. That was an allegation she also made in the email she sent to CBS News staff.

“We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. 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.”

If the administration had actually refused to comment, then she would be in the right and have had no problems in running the story the way it was presented.

The Trump admin responded, just not the way Alfonsi wanted…

According to Axios, written comments were provided by three different departments.

“According to a source familiar with the “60 Minutes” team’s correspondence with the administration, journalists reached out to press officials at the White House, State Department and DHS, all of which provided comment to CBS News ahead of the piece’s anticipated run date.”

While it’s true that Trump administration officials contacted by Alfonsi declined to be interviewed on camera, three different departments did provide comment. With her statement, the casual viewer would be forgiven for thinking the government provided no comment when in fact they did.

Alfonsi had no responsibility to read out or publish all of the statements in full, including a 300-word statement from DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin. However, there is a duty to include some of the responses given and by refusing to include anything that was provided, Alfonsi and the 60 Minutes team were not giving viewers the full story.

By not including comment, Alfonsi surrendered every journalist’s best defence…

If Alfonsi and her team had included even part of the response from McLaughlin, it would have given them a defence to any complaints about the story from the Trump administration. At that point, 60 Minutes would have been able to say that they asked specific questions about specific allegations, and the administration did not address those questions or allegations in their response.

By not including any of the responses, 60 Minutes, and by extension CBS News looks like they are hiding something, being one-sided and unfair.

Weiss offered advice on who to interview…

In her memo saying the piece wasn’t ready, Weiss pointed out that people like Border Czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller aren’t shy about doing media interviews. She not only suggested that one of these individuals be asked to give on camera comment, she sent along their mobile numbers for Alfonsi and her team to call them.

That clearly didn’t happen and appearing on Fox News; Miller said he didn’t recall being contacted about an interview for the story.

As you will read in the full memo below, there were other issues that Weiss had with the story, not political, but real structural issues with the story that she suggested be fixed to make the story stronger.

There are people who will ignore everything that I wrote about and claim that Bari Weiss, working for David Ellison is simply bending the knee to the Trump White House. Nothing could be further from the truth, in pulling this piece to have it fixed, Weiss was simply doing her job.

Alfonsi’s over the top reaction, her claim that “I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight,” is an invitation for Weiss to fire her. And if Weiss does fire Alfonsi, I think it would be with reasonable cause.

If your editor-in-chief tells you to include comment from the main character in your story and you refuse, that is irresponsible journalism, something Weiss said she is trying to prevent at CBS News.

Read the full statement from Weiss to staff on the matter…

Hi all,

I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.

• Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.

• At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.

• The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.

• Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?

• We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.

My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.

I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.

Yours,

Bari