New CBS News head Bari Weiss has violated one of the core principles of journalism: do not become the story. Over the weekend, mutiny erupted when CBS News staff realized she’d personally vetoed a bombshell 60 Minutes segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.
Titled “Inside CECOT”, the meticulously researched segment featuring inmates revealing the “torture, sexual and physical abuse” they suffered in “four months of hell”. Naturally, this would be highly embarrassing to the Trump administration, which would rather you not know what’s going on in CECOT.
Here is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her ‘60 Minutes’ colleagues in full: pic.twitter.com/ilGoSROQEs
— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) December 22, 2025
This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen
Weiss did her best to ensure you wouldn’t know the inner workings of CECOT. But, in a display of cartoonish incompetency, it turns out CBS News did inadvertently upload the segment to their Global TV app and didn’t realize it until it was too late. Now it’s all over the internet, and millions of people are watching. Whoops!
Here’s the full 60 Minutes segment on CECOT that Bari Weiss and CBS censored.#BoycottCBS pic.twitter.com/lrZF4I7rOD
— @Ima(@imatweet25) December 23, 2025
On watching it, you will quickly understand why Weiss squashed it, as it’s enormously embarrassing for the White House. Inmates detail being made to kneel in stress positions for 24 hours at a time, and if they fell, they’d be tossed in “the island”, a tiny pitch-black cell in which they’d be brutally beaten every 30 minutes.
It’s genuinely nightmarish stuff and will make you feel squeamish about what Trump is doing in American voters’ names. However, if this had aired, most would just throw it onto the increasingly large pile of horrible things happening in the world and move on with their life. But, by trying to censor it, Weiss has activated the “Streisand Effect”.
This is so named because in 2003 Barbra Streisand tried to suppress a photo of her house published on a website documenting coastal erosion. She sued the photographer and lost, with the consequence that many, many more people saw the photo than would ordinarily have.
Weiss’s trying and failing to squash the CECOT segment has, in a way, been incredible marketing for it and exposed it to a much wider global audience than would ordinarily have watched it. All of which makes the whole situation darkly amusing: this is the one thing they didn’t want to happen!
