(CNN) — CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss decided to shelve a planned “60 Minutes” story titled “Inside CECOT,” creating an uproar inside CBS, but the report has reached a worldwide audience anyway.
On Monday, some Canadian viewers noticed that the pre-planned “60 Minutes” episode was published on a streaming platform owned by Global TV, the network that has the rights to “60 Minutes” in Canada.
The preplanned episode led with correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s story — the one that Weiss stopped from airing in the US because she said it was “not ready.”
Several Canadian viewers shared clips and summaries of the story on social media, and within hours, the videos went viral on platforms like Reddit and Bluesky.
“Watch fast,” one of the Canadian viewers wrote on Bluesky, predicting that CBS would try to have the videos taken offline. Indeed, CBS parent Paramount began filing copyright claims, leading to some of the YouTube streams being disabled.
Progressive Substack writers and commentators blasted out the clips and urged people to share them. “This could wind up being the most-watched newsmagazine segment in television history,” the high-profile Trump antagonist George Conway commented on X.
A CBS News representative acknowledged that the Canadian stream happened “mistakenly.”
Alfonsi’s report was weeks in the making. Weiss screened it for the first time last Thursday night. The story was finalized on Friday, according to CBS sources, and was announced in a press release that same day.
On Saturday morning, Weiss began to change her mind about the story and raised concerns about its content, including the lack of responses from the relevant Trump administration officials.
But networks like CBS sometimes deliver taped programming to affiliates like Global TV in advance. That appears to be what happened in this case: The Friday version of the “60 Minutes” episode was shipped to Global TV.
Then a “change order” went out on Saturday telling Global TV that a “new version” of “60 Minutes” was being sent. The revised episode aired on Global TV’s network Sunday night. But then the original Friday version of the show was posted on Global TV’s app.
“While Global TV has removed the episode from their app, this segment has since been posted on social and digital media,” a CBS News representative said. “Paramount’s content protection team is in the process of routine take down orders for the unaired and unauthorized segment.”
CBS staffers who disagreed with the Weiss decision to hold the segment were thankful for the slip-up.
The inadvertent Canadian stream is “the best thing that could have happened,” a CBS source told CNN on Monday evening, arguing that the Alfonsi piece is “excellent” and should have been televised as intended.
People close to Weiss have argued that the piece was imbalanced, however, because it did not include interviews with Trump officials.
Weiss told staffers on Monday, “We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.” However, in an earlier memo to colleagues, Alfonsi asserted that her team tried, and their “refusal to be interviewed” was “a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”
At the end of the segment that streamed on Global TV’s platform, Alfonsi said 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.”
The segment included sound bites from President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But it was clearly meant to be a story about Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador, not about the officials who implemented Trump’s mass deportation policy.
“Tonight, you’ll hear from some of those men,” Alfonsi said in her intro. “They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell.”
“The torture was never-ending. Interminable,” said Luis Munoz Pinto, one of the former detainees interviewed by Alfonsi. “There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating or vomiting on themselves.”
Alfonsi also interviewed a representative of Human Rights Watch, which published an 81-page report in November about abuses at the prison.
In a memo to colleagues on Sunday saying that Weiss had “spiked” the story, Alfonsi asserted that it was done for “political,” not editorial reasons.
Philippe Bolopion, executive director at Human Rights Watch, told CNN that Alfonsi’s allegation was troubling, “especially in light of pressures on press freedom in the US.”
“We look forward to the segment airing,” Bolopion said. “The evidence is clear regardless of what airs on 60 Minutes: the Trump administration disappeared these Venezuelan men to a mega prison in El Salvador where they were systematically tortured.”
The-CNN-Wire
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