The firestorm over the editorial decision made by CBS News to pull a 60 Minutes segment on migrant detentions at CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison, rages on. The controversy has now spilled over to the CBS Evening News, which aired a report on the growing scandal.
Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on Monday, December 22nd, 2025:
JERICKA DUNCAN: Well, now to a story about CBS News. A few hours before last night's edition of 60 Minutes, viewers learned that a segment that had been promoted would not air. It's about a notorious prison in El Salvador. And the Trump administration's decision to send Venezuelans and others there who it says entered the U.S. illegally. The correspondent, 60 Minutes veteran Sharyn Alfonsi, sent an email to CBS News colleagues saying the story is factually correct, and accusing CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of pulling it for political reasons. Alfonsi says that despite requests for interviews, no one in the Trump administration would participate in the story. In an email, she wrote that, quote: "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a kill switch." In a statement, Weiss says in part, quote: "Holding stories that aren't ready for whatever reason, that they lacked sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices, happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it's ready." And CBS News released a statement saying: “The 60 Minutes report on ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast. We determined it needed additional reporting.”
The copy read by fill-in anchor Jericka Duncan is virtually identical to that read by Nate Burleson on CBS Mornings, as noted earlier by our very own Tim Graham. What is most notable here is Duncan’s intentional pause and deep breaths before getting around to reading the copy. The pause itself: unnatural, given the cadence and pacing of an evening newscast, with fractions of a second before stories. The copy, structured with Alfonsi’s quote followed by Weiss’s quote and then the statement from CBS News, reads like a rebuke to an insurrectionist Alfonsi.
This much is more evident once you lay eyes on Weiss’s email to the newsroom laying out her vision for the piece- this is, she wanted to see more journalistic rigor applied to the story, perhaps resulting in a harder line towards The White House, than was applied by Alfonsi and team. And given Alsonsi’s penchant for what could be described as partisan hackery (Exhibit A: her disgraceful smear of Gov. Ron DeSantis, using a doctored video clip to imply he was engaged in a pay-to-play scam with Publix Supermarkets over vaccine distribution), Weiss’s request seems more than reasonable.
This is a developing story, and we will provide additional updates as they come online. Finally, I’ll note that this is probably the one time where we may have looked forward to one of former anchor John Dickerson’s overwrought and whiny editorials on Evening News Plus,
