60 Minutes' Sharyn Alfonsi expects Bari Weiss to fire her for factual reporting
Self-described “pain in the ass,” Sharyn Alfonsi—the 60 Minutes‘ correspondent who came under fire last winter for daring to report a story about the American concentration camps in El Salvador without the White House’s buy-in—doesn’t expect to be around long. Last night, Alfonsi received the Ridenhour Prize for Truth Telling at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where, playing to the event’s theme of hope, she said, “My hope recently has been that I still have a job, and every morning I wake up to another headline that says I’ve been fired.”
Earlier this year, Alfonsi became what all journalists try not to be: The story. The reporter of “Inside CECOT,” a 60 Minutes segment on the Venezuelans sent to immigrant detention centers in El Salvador, Alfonsi found herself at odds with her new boss, Bari Weiss, whose job inside CBS appears to be running defense for the White House and whose name elicited boos inside the event, per The Guardian. Weiss spiked the feature, originally set to air in mid-December, until the Trump administration could weigh in. CBS ended up airing the segment on January 18, with a few changes and no sit-down with the president. But the point was not just to include the lucid perspective that only President Donald J. Trump could offer. According to Alfonsi, it was “the result of a very aggressive contagion: The spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear.”
In her remarks, Alfonsi offers a candid look inside Weiss’ CBS, where the White House’s opinion, even if they ignore the request, is apparently a requirement for any story. Alfonsi, for the record, requested comment from the administration, which never responded, but her bosses wouldn’t run the story until they got it. When the White House again ignored requests, CBS asked Alfonsi to change the story. “I refused,” she said. “Not because I’m a pain in the ass, which I am, but because the story was factually correct.”
“My stance did not make my new bosses very happy,” she continued. “I was doing my job, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Fear is a funny thing – it can paralyze you, or it can point you to exactly what needs to be protected. Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things. We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence. There is a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.”
Related Knowledge Center: The CBS submission
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