The Media Research Center unsurprisingly saw no problem with CBS News chief Bari Weiss exercising censorship by stopping a “60 Minues” segment. Tim Graham wrote in a Dec. 22 post:
The 60 Minutes team at CBS has suffered a setback in its anti-Trump crusade, and it furiously leaked that story right into the newspapers. Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi assembled what we could guess was a typical hit piece on the “notorious” CECOT prison in El Salvador that temporarily held illegal migrant cause celebre Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.
The Wall Street Journal reported a combative note from Alfonsi to fellow 60 Minutes staffers that quickly leaked to the media, where she said her segment was being held for political reasons, not editorial ones. Alfonsi said Weiss had “spiked” the story and not given her a chance to discuss it further.
“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.”
Every editorial decision at 60 Minutes looks like a political one. But it’s only “political” if anyone interferes with their hatchet jobs. Citing allegedly “rigorous” attorneys and “Standards and Practices” when they’ve approved all your previous attack segments doesn’t mean those stories were chock full of facts and fairness.
How does Graham know that the “60 Minues” people are lying about how this segment was vetted? He doesn’t — he’s simply engaging in partisan speculation. He went on to whine:
CBS put out a report on its own internal feud on Monday morning. Nate Burleson strangely said the story focused on a “notorious prison in El Salvador and the Trump administration’s decision to send Venezuelans and others who it says entered the U.S. illegally.” They contest Team Trump’s grasp on facts on everything.
[…]Alfonsi could not abide Weiss wanting a Trump official to comment: “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…. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state,” Alfonsi wrote.
In the real world, it appears that “60 Minutes” gave the Trump administration an opportunity to comment on the segment, but it chose not to. That’s not the fault of “60 Minues,” and Graham doesn’t explain why it should be.
Graham went on to play whataboutism: “If Alfonsi wants to trash Weiss for curtailing her speech, she could review her 60 Minutes piece hailing the Germans for cracking down on free speech on the internet.”
Jorge Bonilla followed with a post on related coverage, and he didn’t feel the need to put “notorious” in scare quotes like Graham did:
The firestorm over the editorial decision made by CBS News to pull a 60 Minutes segment on migrant detentions at CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison, rages on. The controversy has now spilled over to the CBS Evening News, which aired a report on the growing scandal.
[…]The copy read by fill-in anchor Jericka Duncan is virtually identical to that read by Nate Burleson on CBS Mornings, as noted earlier by our very own Tim Graham. What is most notable here is Duncan’s intentional pause and deep breaths before getting around to reading the copy. The pause itself: unnatural, given the cadence and pacing of an evening newscast, with fractions of a second before stories. The copy, structured with Alfonsi’s quote followed by Weiss’s quote and then the statement from CBS News, reads like a rebuke to an insurrectionist Alfonsi.
This much is more evident once you lay eyes on Weiss’s email to the newsroom laying out her vision for the piece- this is, she wanted to see more journalistic rigor applied to the story, perhaps resulting in a harder line towards The White House, than was applied by Alfonsi and team.
LIke Graham, Bonilla refused to admit that Alfonsi gave the Trump administration an opportunity to comment on the segment.
When the segment did air elsewhere, Curtis Houck devoted a Dec. 23 post to dismissing it as “biased as hell”:
On Monday night, the now-infamous 60 Minutes segment pulled by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss seemed to have self-deported and aired up in Canada on Global TV, one of its broadcast networks. With it now available to the masses (thanks to social media), we can now give it a full viewing and not a she-said, she-said between Weiss and correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Spoiler alert: the piece was biased as hell, lacking the balance and nuance Weiss asked for.
Between the two sympathetic interview subjects, the use of a far-left so-called human rights group, lying about the administration’s lack of responses to comment requests, and chatting it up with Berkeley students, Alfonsi’s piece had it all.
Houck then acused Alfonsi of lying:
Later in the story, she claimed “[t]he Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador,” but Axios’s Sara Fischer reported Monday night that the “[White House], State Dept and DHS all provided on record comment in response to CBS News journalists’ request for comment ahead of the segment.”
Seeing as how “[n]one of those comments made the air,” we can say Alfonsi and her team are guilty of a pants-on-fire lie.
Hoiuck also grumbled that “Alfonsi gave wide latitude to an Americas expert with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, which are the same people who want you to believe Gazans are the ones being slaughtered in a genocide by Israelis, not the other way around.” He failed to explain why this is not the case.
Bonilla gloated the next day:
Sharyn Alfonsi’s hack job of a CECOT feature for 60 Minutes, pulled due to what could be charitably described as deficient reporting, has triggered a firestorm within the elitist media. But that’s not all. The report has now also triggered an “overhaul” of standards and procedures at CBS and 60 Minutes.
[…]CBS News, and 60 Minutes in particular, was broken long before Weiss took over. Alfonsi is the poster child of that brokenness, what with such previous lowlights as the attempted smear of Gov. Ron DeSantis using selectively edited footage, and her cheering of German censorship.
A “broader overhaul of standards and procedures” is certainly welcome at CBS, but it should have come well before the CECOT fiasco.
[…]Had Alfonsi merely committed deficient reporting and kept a subsequent low profile, perhaps this would not be such a vocal issue. But she then decided to insulate herself from the ensuing blowback and do so in the most insurrectiony way: by sending and publishing an inflammatory email defending the piece, which then riled up the entire chattering class.
Now, as a result, there will be increased oversight of CBS News. Long overdue, if you ask us.
Why is the MRC so determined to defend CECOT? That’s not explained.