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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE 60 MINUTES SCANDAL IS WHAT CREEPING AUTHORITARIANISM LOOKS LIKE
 
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Ben Burgis
December 24, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Bari Weiss blocked a devastating 60 Minutes exposé on CECOT —
showing how Trump administration authoritarianism flows through
corporate media, not jackboot censorship. _

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, photographed on December 10,
2025, while filming a town hall with Erika Kirk. , (Michele Crowe /
CBS News via Getty Images)

 

In September, Bari Weiss had a modest position in the media landscape
as the proprietor of the _Free Press_. It’s a relatively minor news
outlet combining center-right commentary on America’s culture wars
with a fanatical devotion to defending the State of Israel. In
October, David Ellison, the owner of media behemoth Paramount
Skydance, bought the _Free Press_ for an eye-popping $150 million
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and appointed Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News.

As the _New York Times_ notes
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it’s hard to escape the impression that this was done not just
because of Ellison’s ideological affinity with Weiss, but as a
tactic for currying favor with the Trump administration. Ellison has
been “courting Mr. Trump’s support” for “a hostile bid to
outmaneuver a rival company, Netflix, and acquire the media behemoth
Warner Bros.” But Trump has used recent episodes of CBS’s _60
Minutes_ to “suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s
stewardship of CBS.”

Bluntly, it looks very much like Weiss, who’d previously run a small
magazine that devoted a lot of its time to accusing advocates for
Palestinian rights of antisemitism, was brought in as a kind of
political commissar
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amount of programming on _60 Minutes_ that would displease Trump. And
that suspicion was massively reinforced on Sunday, when Weiss blocked
_60 Minutes _from airing a long-planned segment on human rights abuses
that the Trump administration and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele
conspired to commit at El Salvador’s notorious Centro de
Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration extra-judicially deported
hundreds of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers to El Salvador,
where Bukele had cut a deal with Trump to keep the deportees in CECOT
in exchange for direct payment from the United States. The legal
rationale was that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 allowed such
deportations without judicial oversight in a time of war, and that the
US was “at war” with the Venezuelan drug gang Tren de Aragua.

About half of the deportees had no criminal records of any kind, and
according to an examination of ICE’s own records done by Human
Rights Watch and meticulously confirmed by the team at _60 Minutes_,
only about 3% of them had a record involving violent or even
potentially violent crimes. They were classified as Tren de Aragua
members on the basis of a points system
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where detainees got points for having tattoos that immigration
officers suspected of being gang-related, even though experts on
Venezuelan gangs consistently say that Tren de Aragua doesn’t use
tattoos to signal membership and there are no tattoos that reliably
correlate to membership.

The video leaked
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and it may end up being the most watched _60 Minutes_ segment in
recent memory. If so, it would hardly be the first time that a
political commissar assigned to a media organization ended up being so
incompetent that they achieved exactly the opposite of their intended
effect.

Ironically, the former CECOT prisoner interviewed at the beginning of
the short segment seems to be on the same side of Venezuelan politics
as the Trump administration. He came as a refugee, complaining of the
authoritarianism of the Venezuelan government. He had no criminal
record—not, he says, even a parking ticket. Instead of coming to the
United States before claiming asylum, he waited in Mexico until it was
time to go to California for his scheduled asylum hearing.
Nevertheless, he was detained. His tattoos and his Venezuelan
nationality seem to have been the primary “evidence” that he was a
Tren de Aragua “terrorist.”

When the deportees arrived at CECOT, a commandant told them that they
should know they were now “in hell.” They were forced to their
knees, beaten, and had their heads shaved. They were warehoused forty
to a cell, with no blankets or pillows, and lights shining down on
them twenty-four hours a day. They were never allowed outside.
Detainees described guards routinely hitting their genitals. The only
water they could drink was the same dirty water from the toilets and
shower. They were never allowed to go outside. And, they were told
when they first arrived, they would continue to live in these
conditions until they died. The man who’d waited patiently in Mexico
until his asylum hearing in the US recalls being told by the
commandant that he would “never see the light of day again.”

Fortunately, that turned out not to be true. The Trump administration
initially stonewalled when a judge ordered the return of one of the
other deportees, claiming that it had no control over what happened in
El Salvador’s prisons—never mind that it was literally paying the
Bukele regime to take these prisoners. The prisoner in question,
Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, was eventually returned, though, and after a few
months, the Trump administration, apparently realizing that it _did_
control these men’s fate, took all 250 of them out of CECOT and sent
them Venezuela as part of an exchange for 10 Americans held in
Venezuelan prisons. Even so, the ones who appeared in th_e 60 Minutes_
segment were taking a real and obvious risk in appearing on camera to
document the abuses, especially given that the Trump administration
has been engaged in military aggression against Venezuela, repeatedly
killing Venezuelan citizens and loudly
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threatening
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to forcibly impose “regime change” on the country.

As _60 Minutes_ correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted in an email to her
colleagues protesting the decision, “Our story was screened five
times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and
Practices.” The news team had jumped through every normal hoop and
then some._ 60 Minutes_ had been promoting the segment for days before
Weiss stepped in to nix it, claiming that it “wasn’t ready.”

A key part of her rationale was that it lacked “critical voices”
due to the refusal of Trump administration officials to be interviewed
by_ 60 Minutes_. But as Alfonsi argued, the authoritarian consequences
here are hard to miss. “If the standard for airing a story becomes
‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government
effectively gains control over the _60 Minutes_ broadcast. We go from
an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”

And as bad as that is, it’s even more disturbing that this standard
was imposed by an editor-in-chief seemingly hired to curry favor with
the Trump administration. The whole thing looks unsettlingly like
state censorship with more steps.

In the ten years since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator at
Trump Tower and started the first of his three runs for the
presidency, many commentators of the “resistance liberal” variety
have made dubious or exaggerated analogies between Trump’s brand of
authoritarianism and fascism. That’s never been entirely convincing
on an analytical level
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and overstating the similarities can lead to defeatist conclusions at
a time when it still appears that Trumpism can be defeated through
conventional politics. We don’t want people to flee the country
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We want them to stay and organize for a political program that can
defeat the forces represented by Trump.

 
Even so, in the last year, the administration has often been brazenly
authoritarian, dealing very real blows to civil liberties and
constitutional government. Just as not having brain cancer doesn’t
mean that you don’t have any life-threatening condition at all, the
dissimilarities between Trump’s America and literal fascism don’t
mean that what’s going on right now doesn’t pose a serious threat
to liberal democratic norms. And this CBS scandal is exactly what
creeping authoritarianism looks like in practice.

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Contributors

Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at
Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give
Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently
Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He
Still Matters.

 

 

 

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