“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” Sharyn Alfonsi said of her decision to stand by her work as the editor-in-chief pulled her “Inside
Marita Vlachou at HuffPost:
“60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi said it’s “hard to watch” as “corporate meddling and editorial fear” take hold at CBS News, while also raising concerns about her future at the network during a speech Thursday, according to The Guardian.
Alfonsi made the comments while receiving the Ridenhour prize for courage at the National Press Club in Washington. Alfonsi was the correspondent behind the “60 Minutes” segment on Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador that was abruptly pulled by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss hours before it was set to air. “I will not linger on the internal mechanics of the dust-up at CBS that led to our Cecot story being pulled, but we have to be honest about what it represents,” Alfonsi said on Thursday, per The Guardian. “It wasn’t an isolated editorial argument. In my view, it was the result of a more aggressive contagion: the spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear. It’s hard to watch.” The segment, originally meant to air on Dec. 21, was eventually broadcast on Jan. 21.
While Weiss argued she held the original piece because “it wasn’t ready,” Alfonsi at the time described the move as “political” because the segment had already met internal reporting standards. On Thursday, Alfonsi once again defended her position against changes to the story, adding that a subsequent effort to get a comment from an administration official to include in the report failed. “My stance did not make my new bosses very happy... I believe I was doing my job, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” she said. Alfonsi suggested her job at the network is on shaky ground. “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,” she said.
60 Minutes reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, the one behind the “Inside CECOT” report that Bozo Bari tried to bury, noted that it’s hard to watch the decline of CBS News and could be facing a potential exit from the network.
