After a disagreement with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss over a piece about the Trump administration’s handling of deported migrants, long-time 60 Minutes journalist Sharyn Alfonsi is allegedly quitting CBS News.
According to a story on Page Six, Alfonsi will depart the network when her contract expires at the end of May.
She began her career as a correspondent in New York in 2002 and returned to CBS in 2011 following a brief time at ABC News. She has worked at CBS for the most of her career.
Since December, Alfonsi’s future at the network has been in doubt due to her strong disagreement with Weiss’s decision to remove her story about the infamously cruel CECOT jail in El Salvador.
In March 2025, the Trump administration sent over 250 Venezuelan men to prison, a contentious decision given that they were not from El Salvador. Although those men were eventually freed from CECOT, others of Salvadoran citizens who had been deported from the US are still there.
Alfonsi’s piece included exclusive interviews with deportees who claimed to have been beaten and sexually attacked by guards, despite the fact that the horrific conditions of CECOT had already been extensively covered by foreign media.
The narrative also publicly questioned the Trump administration’s and the supportive Salvadoran government’s claims that some of the inmates were gang members.
However, Weiss said that Alfonsi and her crew did not perform enough reporting and that they needed to meet an administration official on camera just hours before the episode was scheduled to air on December 21.
Alfonsi informed her coworkers that Weiss’s choice to not broadcast the CECOT article was “political” in internal emails that the Los Angeles Times was able to access. The account, she claimed, had been thoroughly examined and had passed every regular legal assessment.
After criticising editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s decision in December to remove her 60 Minutes piece about the infamously cruel CECOT prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had deported roughly 250 Venezuelan migrants, Sharyn Alfonsi is allegedly quitting CBS News.
Weiss stated at the time that she removed the section because it lacked on-camera interviews with members of the Trump administration and did not sufficiently advance the story. Later, in January, the segment was broadcast.
In her emails, Alfonsi also mentioned that she had contacted representatives from the State Department, the White House, and the Department of Homeland Security. They all declined to comment.
Alfonsi wrote, “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO.”Their unwillingness to participate in an interview is a calculated move meant to ruin the narrative.
Only two months had passed since Weiss took over as chief editor of CBS News. After her digital media platform, The Free Press, was acquired by CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, she was elevated to the role.
Weiss insisted that she pulled the item only because it “did not advance the ball,” not for political reasons.
The public is aware of the appalling treatment Venezuelans have received in this prison. Two months later, we still need to do more in order to print an article on this topic. This is “60 Minutes.”” The day after the article was scheduled to air, she allegedly stated in an editorial call, “We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.”
After CBS shared a version of the story with Global Television Network, one of Canada’s biggest networks, it unintentionally appeared on their app a few days later. On the internet, copies of the program started to spread extensively.
Viewers were able to compare the two versions when the program finally aired in January.
The administration’s response was added to the end of the piece, but the rest of the story remained essentially same. Additionally, images of tattoos on two of the migrants Alfonsi had met were sent by the government.
On March 16, 2025, migrants suspected of being Tren de Aragua were escorted to their cells at CECOT.
Alfonsi (second from left) is shown with Cecilia Vega (second from right) and Lesley Stahl (left), two other 60 Minutes correspondents.
Alfonsi has reportedly hired prominent entertainment attorney Bryan Freedman to represent him now that it is increasingly likely that he would leave the network.
“I will not linger on the internal mechanics of the dust-up that led to our CECOT story being pulled, but we have to be honest about what it represents,” Alfonsi said after accepting the Ridenhour Prize for Courage at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on April 30, the first time she had publicly discussed her disagreement with the CBS leadership over this story. It was, in my opinion, the outcome of a more aggressive contagion: the spread of editorial dread and corporate intervention. “It’s difficult to watch,” she continued.
It appears that Alfonsi has now hired well-known entertainment attorney Bryan Freedman.
Don Lemon, Tiffany Cross, and Tucker Carlson are just a few of the media personalities whom Freedman has represented during their controversial departures from network television roles.
After Freedman was fired from NBC in 2018 for making contentious remarks regarding blackface, Megyn Kelly hired her. In order to secure the remaining $30 million of her $69 million contract, he negotiated a settlement.
Freedman and CBS were contacted by The Daily Mail for comment.
