Notes from someone who's withstood White House pressure to stop an explosive story—and who once even had a 60 Minutes piece spiked Edited by Sam Thielman
I'M NOTICING A PATTERN among certain people within my profession who've jumped to the defense of Bari Weiss, the oligarch functionary installed at CBS by new owner David Ellison to enforce ideological discipline upon its journalists. Caitlin Flanagan, Chris Cilizza—these are not people who produce investigative journalism. These are take-merchants and mouthpieces who publish what powerful people tell them over text and DM as if it's a transgressive secret and not a comms strategy. Such people would not understand what it means to censor the 60 Minutes piece about the CECOT torture prison, because they don't understand what it takes to produce it. As it happens, I do. I've been part of a team that had to withstand White House and Security State hostility and confrontation on a sustained basis as we revealed the global surveillance dragnet created by the National Security Agency and exposed to the press by Edward Snowden. A decade before that, I was part of a team that had a different piece of investigative journalism spiked by 60 Minutes. That aggravating experience resulted not from White House pressure, but because CBS executives were embarrassed by a different piece, to the point where they were too cowed to air ours. Being an investigative journalist will expose you to cowardice from your higher-ups, and even occasional bravery from them. When either reaction occurs, the newsroom—both those who worked on the piece at issue and those who did not—takes sharp notice, and draws lessons for their own work about what will and will not be publishable. Journalism is not a rigidly top-down enterprise like the military and shouldn't generally be compared, but in both cases, command environment matters. Can we have a grown-up conversation about this? One that doesn't involve pretending that CBS was an unfailing bastion of integrity until the vandal Weiss wrecked it all? Carl Bernstein revealed in 1977 that William Paley, the legendary midcentury CBS president, "enjoyed an easy working and social relationship" with CIA Director Allen Dulles, to the point where CBS was "unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset." The Paley-Dulles relationship was an example of an establishment coming into alignment. So too it is with Weiss, the Ellisons and Donald Trump. What valuable journalism existed, and will exist, at CBS came, and will come, in spite of such relationships. I WAS NEVER AN EMPLOYEE of 60 Minutes. But when I was 23, I co-authored a cover story for The New Republic digging into two of the Bush administration's lies upon which it had predicated the invasion of Iraq. David Gelber, a 60 Minutes producer for the late Ed Bradley, contacted me to bring me aboard as a consultant for what he conceived of as an "Hour": a special episode of 60 Minutes II devoted to a single deep dive on a Serious Subject. For ten months, David, his reporting partner whose name I apologize for forgetting, two other consultant-journalists and I conducted interviews and traced the provenances of the pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons efforts and his ties to al-Qaeda, both of which were marginal-to-nonexistent. Part of that effort involved looking into the forged documents that purported to uncover Saddam acquiring a kind of uranium from Niger and their ties to Italian intelligence, although I wasn't part of the team that went to Italy, sadly. Before working with 60 Minutes, I didn't even know what I didn't know about how to report and present a documentary for television. I had only ever worked in print—only ever thought about working in print—and didn't understand the ways in which creating a visual and audio-enabled story requires different approaches to craft. I could use anonymous intelligence sources in print and could not do that on TV (for this piece, at least). I had to be attentive to subtleties of expression and soundtrack that could cue a viewer to entertain a perspective without ever making that perspective explicit, and that potential for unfairness was pointed out to me by the production team. As a novice, I was completely ignorant of how to create an investigative TV news piece that cleared the bar for publication. When CBS veterans talk about how little the inexperienced Weiss knows about what goes into a responsible 60 Minutes piece, I flash back to my time on this Hour from 2004. Anyway, after a lot of work—I interviewed then-Senator Joe Biden for this piece, twice—the Hour was edited, finalized, cleared the standards-and-practices review that's as opaque to me as a papal conclave, and given a September 2004 airdate. I started inviting friends over for when it was supposed to air. Then David called me and said we were getting bumped. Mary Mapes, a producer for Dan Rather, had a really hot story about George W. Bush's National Guard records that the executives at 60 wanted to run first. No big deal, David said, this stuff happens. They'll air the Hour a couple days or maybe weeks after the Rather story. If you're middle-aged or older, you might remember what happened next. Dan Rather torched his career at CBS by airing forged documents purporting to show Bush as derelict in the Texas National Guard service that was Bush's ticket out of Vietnam. CBS News was obstinate for days before admitting error, and the episode justifiably became a major media scandal weeks before a presidential election. I was naive and wondered how long it would take before 60 Minutes aired the Hour. After all, our work was entirely unrelated to Rather's, produced by a completely different journalistic team, and had cleared every stage of pre-publication vetting. I had to be told—gently, as one would address an idiot—that there was no way CBS would air a story that asked how powerful people could be so delusional in their pursuit of an agenda that they would rely on obvious forgeries. I had turned 24 and learned a valuable lesson about the business I had chosen. NINE YEARS LATER, I had just been hired as the U.S. national-security editor of The Guardian when Edward Snowden gave the independent journalist Laura Poitras and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald (along with Guardian journalist Ewan MacCaskill and, separately, Bart Gellman of the Washington Post) a document trove that revealed the operations and the scope of post-9/11 U.S. surveillance. This story has been told many times and I don't want to derail what we're talking about by retelling it. Suffice it to say that my role on the first Snowden story, the one revealing the ongoing NSA collection in bulk of purely domestic phone metadata, was to call up Verizon (the subject of an order from the secret FISA Court contained in the Snowden trove) and the White House for comment. This would be how both entities would learn that any NSA document was in our possession, and that we were about to publish journalism about it. The questions and requests I put to them were the subject of intense coordination within our team, as was the timing of when I would reach out. That timing, not long ahead of the stated deadline for response, was meant to convey that we would not be dissuaded from publishing. What happened next was conducted off the record, so even though this was a dozen years ago and much of it has subsequently emerged in various outlets, I'm only going to describe it in vague terms. Representatives from Barack Obama's White House and the various security agencies convened a call with me and, far more importantly, the Guardian's U.S. editor, Janine Gibson. Their goal, variously phrased and employing several arguments, was to get us not to publish. I was far less naive about journalism at 33 than I had been at 24. As the call continued and grew more heated, I found myself wondering if we were going to fold under pressure. If we were going to just be reasonable amid the insistence of powerful people, working not for a conservative administration but a liberal one, that we not go forward. Other news outlets, leading ones, had set that precedent. Snowden didn't take the trove to the New York Times because in 2004, the Times decided not to publish an earlier investigation revealing the warrantless surveillance apparatus until well after the presidential election. (The following year, Jim Risen of the Times, who broke that story, also revealed that the Times in 2002 complied with an administration request not to report that the CIA had a black site in Thailand.) Meanwhile, it hadn't even been a week since I began working for The Guardian. I didn't know this paper or the people who ran it. I didn't know how they would operate under an amount of government pressure that I, certainly, had never before experienced, and I had experienced Security State dissatisfaction with my reporting before. I remembered my time with 60 Minutes, as well as another outlets I've worked for and found myself on the outs with. Reader, I did not know Janine. But after that call I certainly did. And as I've told her many times over the years—and endeavored to show in the many stories I subsequently produced for her, those that derived from the Snowden trove and otherwise—she provided the kind of leadership that every journalist who gets into this business for the right reasons dreams of working under and rarely experiences. Janine (supported by Alan Rusbridger, then the editor-in-chief, based in London) was flexible about reasonable competing approaches to the reporting and implacable both that the reporting would continue and that it had to be water-tight, in order to withstand the relentless and justified scrutiny that it would provoke. I'm unashamedly romantic about this experience, doubtlessly to my detriment. It was a moment when I was involved in journalism as I had always hoped it could be—prying open a truth concealed by several hostile governments that implicated the freedom of literally billions of people—and was not sure actually existed. While the team within The Guardian working on the Snowden material was small, the impact of leadership standing firm amid relentless pressure set a tone throughout a newsroom that spanned multiple continents. That's where my mind goes when I read about Weiss "delaying" the 60 Minutes CECOT piece. To what it would have meant for The Guardian leadership to cave on the Snowden stories. What it meant for the Times leadership to have self-censored its reporting on NSA bulk surveillance and CIA torture. The lesson to any journalist attempting to reveal the highest-stakes stories is that you must fight your outlet if you're going to do the work your audience needs to understand the situation it's in. (More fighting than is typical, I mean; IYKYK.) That your editor considers their job to be stopping you from doing yours. At that point, you either fight a battle you know you're likely to lose, or you quit. THE CECOT PIECE is very strong. You can watch a leaked version here among other places. The achievements of the piece are getting lost amid all this Discourse. Reporter Sharyn Alfonsi got two Venezuelan survivors of CECOT torture tell their stories. One of them, practically a teenager, complied with the Biden administration's violation of the right to asylum by seeking it in Mexico in 2024. When he got an asylum appointment with Customs and Border Protection in California, he received detention instead, despite having no criminal record, before his rendition—let's not call this "deportation," please—to CECOT. "There was blood everywhere. Screams. People crying. People who couldn't take it, who were urinating and vomiting on themselves." The guards smashed his head against the wall, broke one of his teeth, and used their hands to beat his genitals. Detainees drank the same water that was in their toilets, often on the sick recommendation of CECOT medical staff. Another CECOT survivor told Alfonsi that the guards forced him into stress positions, a feature of the CIA black sites, for 24 hours straight. This man said CECOT has what inmates call "an island" for punishment: a room in which they were kept in total darkness, something the CIA also did at an Afghanistan hellhole known as the Dark Prison or the Salt Pit. Midway through the 15-minute piece, we learn that Alfonsi's team verified—through ICE's own data—a Human Rights Watch finding that "at least half" of the 252 Venezuelan migrants Trump rendered to CECOT this spring had no criminal history. Only eight of them had been convicted of a "violent or potentially violent" offense, in direct contrast to the administration's portrayal of who it rendered to CECOT. While the administration declined to cooperate with 60 Minutes, its claims about the purposes to which it conducted the renditions are presented, even as the reporting conducted contradicts them. Alfonsi, displaying a maximum effort at transparency and credibility, spends precious minutes of screen time showing how investigators conducted the verification process for claims made about CECOT. This is journalism. Unless you're Bari Weiss. Weiss didn't think the CECOT piece met her standards—standards which, at her outlet The Free Press, permitted the publication of a revisionist history of George Floyd's murder so factually egregious that Radley Balko wrote a lengthy and detailed refutation. She pulled the piece, ostensibly until it could better present the administration's perspective. In a memo, Weiss shows she either didn't watch the piece attentively or misunderstood it, writing at one point, "Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories." Incorrect: when Alfonsi places ICE spreadsheets of CECOT detainees on camera—see around the 7:43 minute mark in the link provided above—the viewer can see that in many of these cases someone's criminal record is inconclusive, something Alfonsi remarks upon in voice-over. Alfonsi was being methodologically conservative when reporting that "at least half" of the rendered Venezuelans lacked a criminal history. No wonder the Standards & Practices authority at CBS News approved her piece. Weiss additionally claims that the piece doesn't "advance" a "much-covered" story, despite the presence of survivors of CECOT on-camera presenting jarring details of both their torture and the standard operating procedures inside one of the world's most infamous prisons. Weiss is not a reporter, let alone an investigative reporter. As both, and as someone who has reported on detainee abuses for the better part of two decades, I can tell you that whatever you might assume, it is in fact difficult to convince people to talk to a stranger about being tortured, even when they understand that torture as an injustice against them. Imagine having to tell them that the piece they retraumatized themselves to assist won't air. Weiss simply has no idea what it took to report this story, and even less about the value of what her reporter delivered. Ellison would not have installed someone who did. This is the memo of an editor who is both determined to kill a piece and, frankly, out of her depth. Alfonsi was showing restraint when she said Weiss' decision to pull the piece was political. This is what the rising class of owners of the mainstream media is trying to normalize. As criticism of Weiss' decision intensified, particularly after Alfonsi defended her reporting, Weiss followed up with an additional memo. It drips with contempt for her reporters. They don't apparently understand that trust in the press has cratered and they need to do "more legwork" in their pieces to win it back—legwork like providing more opportunities for the administration to defend its (court-reversed) policy of rendering people to a torture prison. "The standards for fairness we are holding ourselves to, particularly on contentious subjects, will surely feel controversial to those used to doing things one way." Yes; it will feel "controversial" to those who know how to produce credible journalism that challenges power. Weiss is reciting right-wing shibboleths designed to reassure right-wing social media and the Ellisons that she will stop such journalism from airing. She is 100 percent right that public trust in mainstream media has vanished, but she will only ever reproduce the failures of credulous, lazy and ignorant elite journalism that prompted rigorous people's loss of trust. Nor will she identify the role of right-wing media and its oligarch patrons in discrediting robust journalism like Alfonsi's. Again, that’s why she has her job. The fact that this woman called her outlet The Free Press is a cynical joke. All it does is model obsequiousness to the reactionary sensibilities of highly censorious elites. Sara Yasin recently marvelled that she had never encountered journalists sharing a Free Press story that they in spite of themselves found insightful. "Over the years, I’ve always seen a 'I know it’s [insert controversial outlet or writer] but this is well-done' about all of the provocateurs and ex-journalism superstars that have faded into the shadows. The work is viewed as a holy craft that, even in the wrong hands, can deliver excellent storytelling," Yasin wrote. While the staff of the Free Press would surely take that as a badge of honor, the available evidence demonstrates that none of them produces work at the level of Radley Balko or Sara Yasin's standard output. (Or, for that matter, Alfonsi's.) The credulous can deny it or deflect it all they want. Every journalist who has been through these sorts of trials by fire reporting on the hardest subjects in government to penetrate sees clearly what Weiss is doing. It is to hollow out journalism of anything that threatens those reactionary elite sensibilities and replace it with a simulacrum of journalism appeasing those sensibilities, and claim to have saved the profession. We don't have to be naive about the failures of elite journalism before the Ellisons bought CBS and installed the unqualified Weiss to recognize that this is no alternative to those failures but instead their logical result. Good night and good luck. WE ARE AT THE STAGE of manufacturing a war with Venezuela where the CIA is conducting drone strikes on Venezuelan ports. Surely unrelatedly, the latest phase of DOGE is about accelerating Pentagon purchases of drones from the new wave of venture-capital backed and oligarch-aligned drone start-ups. [This is potentially a generations-long money hose. Defense tech often flourishes with blank checks from the US military and then trickles down to the consumer sector. We banned Chinese drones last week—Sam.] Meanwhile, the Venezuelan state oil company suffered a cyberattack earlier this month that it understandably blames on the United States. DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE Tulsi Gabbard persecuted American Muslims at the recent Turning Point USA conference. Written off by much of the press as outside the power centers of the administration, the nominal head of U.S. intelligence can say without risk of contradiction, let alone denunciation, that there is a nefarious effort underway to "implement Sharia law… underway in places" like Houston and Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson "is proud to call themselves the first Muslim city," Gabbard is horrified to report. "They are working to implement in their own governments these Islamic principles that are forced on people through the use of laws or violence." This is rank bigotry against two U.S. cities with large Muslim populations, whose achievement of local political power through democratic means—not, despite what the director of national intelligence says, violence—is the real problem Gabbard has. Later in the speech, Gabbard had the temerity to urge people to love their neighbors. GUESS WHO'S BACK? And who the FBI isn't concerned with? That's right, a neo-Nazi cell called The Base. "Our long-term strategic goal is to accomplish something similar to what al-Qaida and IS accomplished in Syria. … Form an organized, armed insurgency to take and hold territory. And establish a white homeland which we control and govern," its leader recently declared. Hey, you know who else called his group The Base?
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