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CBS News is coming under intense criticism after it pulled a fully vetted 60 Minutes investigation into alleged abuses at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, El Salvador operates the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), a massive maximum-security prison built by President Nayib Bukele as the centerpiece of his aggressive crackdown on gangs that once terrorized the country. Designed to hold up to 40,000 inmates, CECOT primarily detains members of groups such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, under a state of emergency that has suspended certain civil liberties. Bukele’s security reforms have dramatically reduced homicide rates and gang violence, and public polling consistently shows him enjoying extraordinary domestic support, with approval ratings often exceeding 80–90%. However, outside critics (including human rights organizations and international observers) accuse the prison of severe overcrowding, lack of due process, indefinite detention, and physical abuse, allegations the Bukele government denies or dismisses as politically motivated. The prison also drew international attention when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT this year, even as legal challenges unfolded in the United States, raising questions about how detainees were classified and whether deportees with limited criminal records were sent into one of the hemisphere’s harshest incarceration systems.

What’s going on now: CBS News and its new leadership are getting hit with a lot of shit after abruptly pulling a 60 Minutes segment titled “Inside CECOT,” just hours before it was scheduled to air. The episode focused on Venezuelan migrants deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s CECOT prison and included interviews with released detainees who alleged severe abuse, torture, and inhumane conditions. The report also scrutinized how US authorities characterized the deportees, questioning whether some were wrongly labeled as dangerous criminals. According to staff involved in the production, the segment had undergone weeks of reporting and multiple internal screenings and had been cleared by CBS’s legal team and standards editors.

The decision to halt the broadcast was made at the eleventh hour by CBS News’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who argued the piece was “not ready” and required additional reporting. Weiss and CBS management said they wanted more context and stronger efforts to secure on-camera responses from Trump administration officials, including senior White House figures. CBS issued a public statement saying the segment needed “additional reporting” and would air at a later date, framing the move as an editorial judgment rather than censorship.

The segment’s correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, sent an email to colleagues accusing the network of pulling the story for“political” reasons, noting that the administration’s refusal to participate had already been disclosed in the piece. She warned that allowing government officials to block stories by declining interviews would effectively give them a “kill switch” over investigative journalism. Executive producer Tanya Simon and other 60 Minutes staff backed the reporting, saying they pushed back against the decision but were ultimately overruled.

This all comes as some Democratic lawmakers and media watchdogs have accused the network of censoring its own reporting to avoid antagonizing Donald Trump at a moment of unusually high corporate and political sensitivity for CBS’s parent company, Paramount. Right now, Paramount is pursuing multibillion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that would require approval from federal regulators (a process in which Trump has publicly signaled he intends to be involved).