By Helen Coster
NEW YORK, May 27 (Reuters) - CBS News has not renewed the contract of Sharyn Alfonsi, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who clashed with Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss over a December report on a Salvadoran prison, according to an interview published on Wednesday in the New York Times.
CBS pulled the segment – about a mega-prison where the U.S. has sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants without trial – hours before it was due to air in the U.S., sparking accusations from inside "60 Minutes" and on Capitol Hill that the network was engaging in self-censorship under political pressure.
Alfonsi told the New York Times on Wednesday that she continues to be employed at CBS, albeit without a contract, and does not expect to return to “60 Minutes,” the storied news magazine show.
The network’s unwillingness to renew her contract “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Alfonsi told the Times. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”
CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance. A network spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters was unable to reach Alfonsi for comment.
The mega-prison segment spread online in December, and then aired on CBS a month later.
Alfonsi criticized the network’s decision at the time, writing in a note to her team that CBS pulled the report for "political" reasons. In a December email to staff defending the decision to hold the piece, Weiss wrote that winning back Americans’ trust "sometimes means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.”
Skydance Media, run by David Ellison - the son of longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, Larry Ellison - acquired Paramount in August and installed Weiss in October as editor-in-chief. David Ellison helped secure regulatory approval for the deal, which created Paramount Skydance, with the promise that the CBS network would reflect the “varied ideological perspectives” of American viewers.
Trump has repeatedly pressured the Federal Communications Commission to revoke station licenses of major U.S. broadcasters NBC and ABC and charge them for using the public airwaves, as he criticized their news programming.
Prior to the deal, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit Trump filed over a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, which he said gave a distorted view of his rival for the White House.
The FCC has said the settlement and regulatory review were unrelated.
(Reporting by Helen Coster; Editing by Nia Williams)
