Sorry, your browser does not support videos.
(Washington) The broadcast of a report on the brutal expulsions of migrants carried out by the Trump administration was blocked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS last weekend, but it was finally made available on the web for a few hours on Monday by a Canadian broadcaster, even going viral. “The best thing that could have happened,” a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
Updated yesterday at
The legendary investigative show 60 minutes was to present on Sunday evening a long subject giving a voice to Venezuelans expelled by the American authorities in March to a prison in El Salvador.
But hours before the broadcast, CBS announced that the report would “air on an upcoming broadcast.” The author of the report, Sharyn Alfonsi, denounced an act of “censorship” and a “political decision”.
This event takes place in a context of major takeover maneuvers in American media groups, all in the shadow of President Donald Trump.
It was editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, a long-time critic of what she considers to be the intellectual conformism of progressive media, who made the decision to block its broadcast, says the journalist behind the report in an internal email reported by the American press.
On Monday, Internet users noticed, however, that the original episode of 60 minutes containing M’s 13-minute reportme Alfonsi was available on the Global TV viewing platform, which holds the rights to the show in Canada.
The initial version of the episode, pre-recorded and presumably transmitted to Global TV, was removed from the platform a few hours later in the evening. But that was all it took for it to be shared numerous times on social networks, fueling the controversy created by the initial decision not to publish it.
“We resisted”
The subject “is factually correct. I believe that removing it now, after all rigorous internal checks, is not an editorial decision, but a political decision,” wrote reporter Sharyn Alfonsi. By not broadcasting a report that has already been announced, “the general public will rightly see this as corporate censorship,” she adds.
The report “needs more work,” CBS said in a statement cited by the New York Times.
The producer ofe 60 MinutesTanya Simon, told her colleagues that she initially resisted Bari Weiss’s order, but “ultimately had to comply.”
“We resisted, we defended our reporting, but she wanted changes,” she said, according to a transcript of a production meeting with her team, published by the Washington Post.
Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News in October, less than three months after the takeover of Paramount, CBS’s parent company, by Skydance, owned by the Ellison family, close to Donald Trump.
With CNN
