Does anyone else find CBS News particularly stressful?

A few days before Christmas, “60 Minutes” was set to air a report on CECOT, the prison in El Salvador where the Trump Administration had sent more than two hundred deportees in March. The men, most of whom were from Venezuela, had been spirited out of the U.S. on a series of late-night flights, in violation of a federal judge’s court order. Sharyn Alfonsi, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, had interviewed two of them. The stories were harrowing. “There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” one of the men told her. She had reached out to the Trump Administration for comment but received only a cursory, two-sentence response.

Like all “60 Minutes” stories, the CECOT segment had been fact-checked and vetted by the network’s legal department. Five separate screenings were held for various editorial stakeholders. Weiss was supposed to attend the final screening, on Thursday afternoon, but she had missed it. She didn’t see the segment until late that night, e-mailing suggestions for a few changes that were incorporated into the piece. The network promoted the segment as the lead story for that Sunday’s episode. Alfonsi flew home to Texas.

The CECOT story was being finalized almost exactly as Ellison was pursuing another major expansion of his growing media empire. Earlier that month, he had launched a hostile takeover bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, the film-and-television conglomerate that had already announced a deal to be acquired by Netflix. In many ways, the outcome depended on Trump, since regulatory approval would be required for either sale to go through. “I’ll be involved in that decision,” Trump had told reporters.

For Ellison, this was suddenly a problem. “60 Minutes” had recently aired an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump ally who had fallen out with the President over his resistance to releasing the F.B.I.’s files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the interview aired. “Since they bought it, 60 minutes has actually gotten WORSE.”

On Saturday morning, Weiss, who reports directly to Ellison, told “60 Minutes” producers she was concerned that no officials from the Trump Administration had been interviewed on camera for the piece. Specifically, she wanted to include the Administration’s argument for its use of the Alien Enemies Act, an eighteenth-century law that Trump officials claimed allowed them to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador without due process. “We should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding his authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority,” Weiss wrote in a note to the producers. “There’s a genuine debate here.” She had “tracked down” numbers for Tom Homan, the border czar, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, which she sent to the “60 Minutes” team.

On Sunday, three hours before broadcast, the CECOT piece was officially pulled from the lineup. “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” Weiss said in a statement. “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.” Alfonsi felt betrayed. “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 in a note to her colleagues. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”

The next day, the Ellisons announced a significant sweetening of their bid for Warner Bros.: Larry would personally guarantee $40.4 billion of the funding. Weiss didn’t come to the CBS offices that day. She joined the morning’s daily editorial meeting via Zoom, beginning with what seemed like a rebuke of Alfonsi. “The only newsroom that I’m interested in running is one where we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters and do so with respect, and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues,” Weiss said. “And anything else is absolutely unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to you.”

That afternoon, during a “60 Minutes” staff meeting, Scott Pelley, a longtime correspondent, expressed frustration that Weiss hadn’t attended any of the screenings of the segment or communicated directly with Alfonsi. “She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously,” he said. A former CBS staffer was soon circulating an open letter to Ellison, expressing alarm at “a breakdown in editorial oversight” that risked “setting a dangerous precedent in a country that has traditionally valued press freedom.” A former CBS executive told me that, even if Weiss’s concerns had been valid, her decision to cut the segment at such a late hour had opened her up to charges of corporate interference: “It makes you wonder, Did someone call once they saw the promo on the air and then she spent more time on it because there was some big complaint?” Sources close to Weiss and Ellison said that Skydance leadership had zero involvement in the story and did not screen the piece.