This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, is facing growing criticism after she abruptly canceled a segment on 60 Minutes about Venezuelan immigrants who were tortured in El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. CBS announced the segment had been pulled three hours before the broadcast Sunday, after Weiss requested multiple changes and reportedly urged 60 Minutes to include an interview with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has orchestrated Trump’s immigration crackdown. On Monday, Weiss told colleagues at CBS, “I held that story because it wasn’t ready,” unquote.
CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the segment, wrote an internal note criticizing the decision. She noted that her team had requested comment from the White House, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Alfonsi wrote, quote, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” unquote.
Alfonsi went on to write, quote, “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. 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,” she wrote.
The controversy comes less than two months after Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief of CBS News. In October, she sold her right-wing digital media outlet, The Free Press, to CBS’s new parent company, Paramount Skydance. Paramount’s biggest shareholder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, a close ally to Trump. Paramount’s CEO is Ellison’s son David, who installed Weiss in her post.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said in a statement, quote, “This is what government censorship looks like: Trump approved the Paramount-Skydance merger. A few months later, CBS’s new editor in chief kills a deeply reported story critical of Trump. A sad day for 60 Minutes and journalism,” unquote.
Bari Weiss made the decision to hold the segment even though CBS had already begun promoting the story online.
SHARYN ALFONSI: It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed from the U.S. back to Venezuela. But instead, they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras and delivered to CECOT, the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.
Did you think you were going to die there?
DEPORTEE: [translated] We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
AMY GOODMAN: The full episode was actually streamed in Canada, because CBS sent the finished piece to its Canadian distributor before the segment was spiked.
Many media commentators have noted Bari Weiss’s decision to hold the segment came shortly after President Trump publicly criticized CBS on Friday.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But NBC’s really bad. And CBS, I mean, I love the new owners of CBS. Something happens to them, though. 60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership than — they just keep treating me — they just keep hitting me. It’s crazy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Alexa Koenig, co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a research professor of law. Alexa Koenig was interviewed for the unaired 60 Minutes piece, talking about her students’ research into human rights abuses in El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. The Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab recently aided Human Rights Watch in its report on CECOT titled “’You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison.”
Alexa Koenig, thank you so much for joining us in this first interview since the 60 Minutes story was spiked. First, as you are both a professor of law and also teach in the journalism school, can you talk about the significance of this story being spiked?
ALEXA KOENIG: I’d be happy to. And thanks so much for having me this morning.
One of the things that the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley is really committed to is training a next generation of students, whether they’re journalism students, law students or otherwise, how to find facts in online digital spaces, how to assess the quality of that information — we know that online places can be rife with propaganda and other mis- and disinformation — and getting that truth, those facts, out to the public. One of the first tenets of ethics in journalism is, of course, to seek truth and report it. That is something that we really try to ingrain in our students and to make sure that that doesn’t follow along political lines, but that there’s a fidelity to finding those facts and to getting them out as broadly as possible.
When this story was spiked, that was, of course, incredibly disappointing, given the extraordinary amount of work that was done by Human Rights Watch and its partners, also by our student investigation team, who had been working pretty much around the clock for several weeks to pull together some of the digital content that could be used to corroborate or potentially disprove what the individuals who’ve been released from CECOT prison had said they’d experienced while in captivity.
So, I think that this is a big moment for American politics. It’s a big moment for getting facts and truth out to the public about what has been done in their name, what is being done with taxpayer dollars. And I do think this is a story that eventually needs to come out.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can explain exactly what this story was? I mean, you have Sharyn Alfonsi responding in an internal memo to the spiking of the story by Bari Weiss, installed by Paramount, the father and son, Larry and David Ellison, close allies of President Trump, saying that there should have been interviews with the Trump administration. And yet you have the producer of the piece saying they repeatedly asked different departments, from Homeland Security to the Trump administration, to respond, and they didn’t, and that if you follow that rule, anytime a government didn’t want a story to be aired, they would just say no.
ALEXA KOENIG: I can’t speak to, of course, what happened within 60 Minutes or the exact contents of the show, but what I can certainly speak to is the kinds of work that was being done and the very careful reporting and investigation for the Human Rights Watch report that had come out fairly recently, before the segment was being investigated and reported.
One of the things that we really tried to support Human Rights Watch on was figuring out how they could corroborate or fill in gaps in their reporting through digital open-source information. One of the things that we built with the United Nations Human Rights Office was something called the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations. Those are the global standards for how to do digital investigations responsibly, fairly and with an eye towards ethics.
And so, one of the pieces we did was we pulled together a number of videos that had been posted to YouTube and other places online. A lot of times, influencers had been invited into CECOT prison, and they had gathered video imagery of the internals of this particular facility. This is one of the most locked-down prisons in the world. One of the things that I think Human Rights Watch was really trying to make sense of is: What is the layout of that prison? What is Module 8? What does that look like? What does it contain? What kind of water did these men have access to? What kind of light sources did these men have access to, and whether that met international standards for people’s human rights being protected?
And so, by taking hours of video footage and really breaking it down screen by screen and analyzing the content of that imagery, we were able to piece together a picture of CECOT prison that could be basically investigated in parallel with the testimonies of the men who had recently been released. I think, very importantly, we did not have access to those testimonies. That is, I think, a really important component of this story, because it meant that we were not being biased by these very human narratives, that are such compelling narratives, when you finally do have a chance to see them, but that we were able to kind of build from the ground up, almost literally, from satellite imagery of the earliest construction of the prison to these internal videos, what these men — what the conditions were like that these men had been held in.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about what you and the Berkeley students did in showing the structure of this prison, of this notorious prison, where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan men?
ALEXA KOENIG: For both my students and myself, I think it was really — probably the best word I can use is “upsetting,” to see the conditions in which these men were being held. I know that the narrative circulating around them was that they were among the worst of the worst and that they were really vicious individuals, but what we saw, regardless of that — which I think we now know from the Human Rights Watch report, in many instances, just was not true — was that the conditions were not conditions that would be consistent with international minimum standards for how people are held in detention facilities.
For example, there was a place where men would be held with a tremendous degree of sensory deprivation, meaning no light. There was no natural source of light. It was incredibly dark in there. And one of the things that we could find from these influencer videos was just that people had bare concrete to sleep on. One of the things that we found was the water sources in some of these cells was so contaminated that there was just one source of water for these men to access. The men, we later knew from the Human Rights Watch report, were often drinking the same water that they were using for bathroom facilities, for washing and cleaning themselves, for cleaning their cells, so it was likely very contaminated. All of this was very consistent, when we looked at the actual built infrastructure of these facilities, with what these men said they had endured while in captivity.
AMY GOODMAN: In November, Human Rights Watch and Cristosal — this is what you’re talking about — released a report, supported by your Investigations Lab, titled “’You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison,” based on interviews with 40 of the men who were ultimately released from CECOT. Democracy Now! spoke with the report’s authors. This is Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal.
NOAH BULLOCK: One of the conclusions we make is that torture is institutionalized in Salvadoran prisons. It’s a state policy. It’s almost as if the prison guards operate on a protocol. It’s impossible that this is the actions of bad guards or bad apples. People were subjected to beatings almost daily.
Upon arrival, they were beaten. When they asked for food and water, they were beaten. When they asked for medical care, on the way to the clinic, they were beaten. They were often denied food, water, clothing, basic hygiene as a tool of punishment or reprisals.
And in the case of the report, we also showed how the Venezuelans resisted and protested the beatings, but then were subjected again to more beatings. There was a punishment cell called “the Island” in their module, where — a tiny space, a solitary confinement cell, where they were taken and beaten regularly. They would be deprived for hours of food and water, or in some cases, days. And even, sadly, we documented cases of sexual abuse.
And it’s important to note that the testimonies were consistent across 40 different individuals who gave testimonies. We were able to document and corroborate their testimonies with photographic evidence that was assessed by independent forensic experts.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was the head of Cristosal, who worked with Human Rights Watch, and you can see our interviews with both Noah Bullock of Cristosal and Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch at democracynow.org. Before their report, in August, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune released a joint investigation that revealed how the Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration say they endured those months of physical and mental abuse at CECOT. It included a video featuring three of the men who were held there: Juan José Ramos, Andry Blanco Bonilla and Wilmer Vega Sandia. This is an excerpt.
WILMER JOSÉ VEGA SANDIA: [translated] Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, terror.
JUAN JOSÉ RAMOS RAMOS: [translated] An officer from El Salvador got on board, and he said, “Either you get off the easy way or the hard way. How will you get off?” “We’re not getting off.” “Oh, the hard way then.” And they started hitting us with batons.
WILMER JOSÉ VEGA SANDIA: [translated] The prison director told us, “Welcome to Hell, where you enter alive and leave dead.”
ANDRY OMAR BLANCO BONILLA: [translated] They forced us to kneel against our will, beating us. There were many people screaming, asking for help, for mercy. The shackles were so tight that they injured our ankles. Many were even bleeding because we were cutting ourselves with the shackles. They would say to us crudely, “Walk, you piece of [bleep].” I remember telling an officer, “I can’t walk. If you loosen the shackles, I can cooperate. But I can’t walk.” I have a medical condition. I’m hypertensive. I was beaten to the point of fainting. They dragged me until we got to the cell block. Then they threw me down. My head hit the floor. I woke up and asked God, “Why am I here?”
JUAN JOSÉ RAMOS RAMOS: [translated] I felt like my world had collapsed. They started putting 10 to 15 people in each cell.
ANDRY OMAR BLANCO BONILLA: [translated] I believe the CECOT prison is not a prison meant to hold inmates. There, I feel like we were treated like animals.
WILMER JOSÉ VEGA SANDIA: [translated] The food tasted like soap. It was shocking. The bathrooms were disgusting. They used the water we had to use the shower.
ANDRY OMAR BLANCO BONILLA: [translated] Sewage, black water pipes ran through the cells. Some people developed respiratory illnesses because of that. The walls were full of mold.
WILMER JOSÉ VEGA SANDIA: [translated] Sleeping on metal, because the beds were iron. I said, “How long are we going to survive this?”
AMY GOODMAN: So, those are three Venezuelan migrants who the Trump administration sent to Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. They were featured in the Texas Tribune/ProPublica report in August, but they’re very similar to the stories that were told in the 60 Minutes report. I mean, I just watched the 60 Minutes report, not because it aired on CBS, but because the contractor in Canada played the 60 Minutes report, because they were sent it, because they’re used to running the 60 Minutes, and it was before it was spiked by the CBS editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
I want to read more from 60 Minutes producer Sharyn Alfonsi’s internal memo about the decision to hold the segment. She writes, “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. These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.” Again, those are the words of Sharyn Alfonsi in an internal memo responding to the spiking of her story.
We’re speaking to Alexa Koenig, who participated in the 60 Minutes report with her students at the Investigations Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. If you can talk about this tenet, giving voice to the voiceless, and what it means? Now that this story is out, it may be — end up being the most viewed story in 60 Minutes history, precisely because CBS tried to kill it. And what this is teaching your students at Cal?
ALEXA KOENIG: What it’s teaching our students at UC Berkeley is really the importance of rigorous reporting and really tight fact-checking. One of the gold — or, the gold standard for any investigation is to bring together physical evidence with testimonial evidence, so the stories of survivors in crisis and conflict, with documentary evidence, so the written reports and records that can actually be collated, now increasingly from digital spaces. I think what these students are doing is trying to bring that process deeper into the 21st century, pulling from social media and having advanced skills. We often now train journalists and others in basic fundamentals of digital open-source investigation precisely because so much of people’s lives today are lived online. I think they learned just how abundant the kinds of information is, even for something as locked down as a prison like CECOT, that there is always, or almost always, going to be information that circulates in these digital spaces, and that it can be an extraordinarily powerful way to help find the facts.
What, again, I think, was so important about the work that these students did was to bring that together with the incredible reporting that’s been done by journalists, including at 60 Minutes. And I think when you get everything pointed in the same direction around the who, what, when, where, why and how and what people really experienced, you have a high degree of confidence that what you’re getting at is the truth. And today, when there is so much noise circulating both online and off, to be able to get to that truth and have some common understanding of the facts of what is being done on behalf of the United States is a really important way, means for us to preserve democracy and, ultimately, fight for the rule of law.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, there’s a really interesting point in this 60 Minutes piece. It’s the story of Kristi Noem going to El Salvador, standing in front of caged men, most of them all tattooed. Can you talk about what your students found? Who were those men?
ALEXA KOENIG: Yes, so, the implication by Kristi Noem standing in front of them were that these were the men from Venezuela that had been sent to El Salvador. But what you can tell from the tattoos and the types of tattoos on the men in the background is that these were almost certainly not the men from Venezuela who had been recently deported from the United States. These were likely Salvadoran gang members and others who were there for a backdrop, I think, for her particular presentation. So, I think even just from that imagery and being able to pull together an understanding of who in what countries use tattoos as a symbol of who they are and their affiliations, and who does not, became really powerful visual information to strongly suggest that these were not the men she was implying that they might be.
AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to ask you, finally, about the significance of the breaking news: Just as the story broke of the spiking of the story, Paramount Skydance announced that Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, who installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS — Larry Ellison will personally guarantee $40 billion in the company’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. This comes about a week after the board of Warner Bros. rejected Paramount’s offer in favor of Netflix. So, if you can talk about the significance of this? If Paramount were to take over, they would take over — Is this correct? — HBO and CNN, as well.
ALEXA KOENIG: One of the trends that I am concerned about is the concentration of ownership over media. We’re seeing that with social media sites being purchased up. We’re also seeing it with more traditional media. When so much of our ability to communicate out facts to the world is concentrated in a small number of people, and there’s a squeezing of independent media and the ability to get independent perspectives and voices out more broadly, I think we’re working with an information ecosystem that is highly dangerous for ensuring that there’s a diversity of voices and perspectives that can be used to hold power to account and to strengthen the ways that we operate in society. We need that diversity. It’s one of the hallmarks of America, and, I think, the ability to bring facts to the American people in ways that they can at least have a common basis of understanding for what’s happening in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Alexa Koenig, I want to thank you so much for being with us, for doing this first interview since the 60 Minutes piece was spiked, with Democracy Now! Alexa Koenig is co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, where she’s also a research professor of law. She was interviewed for the 60 Minutes piece about her research into CECOT along with the students at the Investigations Lab at University of California, Berkeley.
Coming up, another story about journalism, journalist Jasper Nathaniel. He’s recently back from the occupied West Bank, where he was documenting Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians when he himself was attacked by settlers as he tried to document them attacking a woman in her fifties who was there protecting the olive trees. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “In Every Way,” here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
