A 60 Minutes segment controversially spiked by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has still reached a global audience after a Canadian broadcaster mistakenly published it to a streaming platform.
Global TV, which owns the rights to 60 Minutes north of the border, was behind the widely-welcomed gaffe, which a source at CBS told CNN was “the best thing that could have happened.”
Weiss, 41, spiked the segment at the 11th hour, after it had already been promoted on air and online, and distributed to affiliates like Global TV.
The killing of the episode, which detailed inhumane conditions at an El Salvador prison that the Trump administration flew migrants to without due process, was widely criticized as a “political” choice by the MAGA-curious Weiss.
With so much attention on the episode, which Weiss claimed was “not ready” and needed more reporting, it did not take long for Canadians with access to Global TV to record the 14-minute episode and share it online, where it went viral instantly.
The clip has repeatedly been hit with copyright strikes on YouTube and other social media platforms, but it keeps popping back up on X, BlueSky, and Substack.
A “Global” watermark appears in the bottom-right corner of each of the clips. Global TV offers subscribers access to every 60 Minutes episode on its app. It shows episodes for every seven days except for Dec. 21.
The episode, viewed by the Daily Beast, displays veteran CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewing two Venezuelan men who were abruptly flown to the notorious prison CECOT in March on allegations they were members of a violent gang.
One of the men, a college student who sought asylum in the United States, told Alfonsi that not only is he not a gang member, but that he has no criminal record—not even a parking ticket.
Yet, he was sent to spend the rest of his life behind bars at El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where inmates are not permitted communication with the outside world, are only given 30 minutes a day outside their packed cells, and are subjected to beatings and other torture methods.
“Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled until the point of agony,” one of the men interviewed by 60 Minutes said of his treatment at CECOT. “They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”
Alfonsi was one of many who slammed Weiss for pulling the episode.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi, 53, wrote in an email to her colleagues. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision; it is a political one.”
Weiss screened the episode on Thursday but did not decide to pull the plug on the segment until Sunday afternoon.
On Monday, Weiss addressed her decision in a statement to CBS staff: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack 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.”
Neither Weiss nor CBS has publicly addressed the leak of the episode via Global TV.
