What happened
Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi said Wednesday that CBS News had declined to renew her contract, six months after she clashed with newly installed network boss Bari Weiss over a segment on torture in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. According to Alfonsi, her “agent’s inquiries with CBS News over the past several weeks had been met with silence,” The New York Times said.
Who said what
After Weiss pulled the CECOT report, saying it needed an on-camera response from the Trump administration, Alfonsi said in a newsroom memo that the decision was “political” and Weiss was giving the government an editorial “kill switch.” The segment “eventually aired” with “minimal changes,” The Washington Post said, but the “newsroom firestorm” reverberated. In a statement Wednesday, Alfonsi said letting her contract lapse after nearly 20 years “was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting.”
What next?
Alfonsi “remains an at-will employee” at CBS, The Wall Street Journal said. An expected “re-engineering at ‘60 Minutes’” would be “a major gamble” for Weiss, the Times said. Weiss’ “other signature initiative, the remaking of ‘CBS Evening News,’ has suffered from low viewership and some embarrassing errors.”
The network declined to renew her contract, Alfonsi said
