The Media Research Center lustily cheered that CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulled the plug on a “60 Minutes” segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration sent numerous undocumented immigrants. When “60 Minutes” finallly aired the segment a month later, Curtis Houck admitted that the piece “was nearly identical to the one Weiss held up last month.” Jorge Bonilla served up a slightly more detailed assessment in a Jan. 18 post:
After about a month, CBS finally aired the 60 Minutes item on Salvadoran megaprison CECOT that was held for “additional reporting” at the direction of CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. The report finally aired today, and after watching the end result we can conclude that Weiss was right to hold it.
[…]The reason the report was initially pulled was due to its failure to provide balance via an administration response- even if it was a tear sheet of a press release. As Axios noted, reports of no statement provided were false.
Why is Bonilla suddenly trusting Axios, which his employer trashed just a few days earlier as a “left-leaning” outlet that pushed Democratic talking points. But he too couldn’t find much that was added to the report:
The “additional reporting” here consists of a single sentence at the end of this introduction, which should have been included in the original report. The original item as originally prepared and aired in Canada ran in its entirety. The report was followed with an all-new addendum:
[…]Again, we get things that should’ve been included within the original report. This includes further context on how the DHS determined the detainees were a threat, a summary of the requests made to the administration (and subsequent denials) and, finally, the statements made by the administration for purposes of the report, which are listed here.
Of those, the only one made after December 19th was the DHS saying they stood by their December 19th statement. In other words, CBS had everything they were going to get in terms of statements and chose to air them because they refused to provide Alfonsi with a spectacle.
This isn’t to say that the report between the addenda still isn’t partisan slop because it totally is. But the slop now has enough context wherein viewers can assess for themselves.
Given what we now know and having seen the report with context and addenda, we can conclude that Weiss was right to pull the report and send it back for further context. The media morality clerics will undoubtedly howl, but they were always going to howl. The fact is that the First Amendment didn’t self-incinerate and the Republic did not fall.
Again, the core of the report wasn’t changed — he was happy more rebuttal was included. That’s it. He does not dispute the accuracy of the original report. That’s what the MRC was complaining about for the past month.