Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]
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Hi all,
I’m writing with specific guidance on what I’d like for us to do to advance the CECOT story. I know you’d all like to see this run as soon as possible; I feel the same way. But if we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice.
Last month many outlets, most notably The New York Times, exposed the horrific conditions at CECOT. Our story presents more of these powerful testimonies—and putting those accounts into the public record is valuable in and of itself. But if we’re going to run another story about a topic that has by now been much-covered we need to advance it. Among the ways to do so: does anyone in the administration or anyone prominent who defended the use of the Alien Enemies Act now regret it in light of what these Venezuelans endured at CECOT? That’s a question I’d like to see asked and answered.
- At present, we do not present the administration’s argument for why it sent 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing? Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.
- The data we present paints an incongruent picture. 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. We should spend a beat explaining this. We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged? My point is that we should include as much as we can possibly know and understand about these individuals.
- Secretary Noem’s trip to CECOT. We report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece. I also think that the ensuing analysis from the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?
- We need to do a better job of explaining the legal rationale by which the administration detained and deported these 252 Venezuelans to CECOT. It’s not as simple as Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act and being able to deport them immediately. And that isn’t the administration’s argument. The admin has argued in court that detainees are due “judicial review”—and 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. There’s a genuine debate here. If we cut down Kristi Noem analysis we’d have the time.
My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you.
Yours,
Bari
Bari thinks the government should be able to quash any story it wants by simply refusing to "present the administration's argument."
The reporters reached out to the govt for comment. They chose not to respond. If you insist on holding off publishing until you have a comment you’ve just given the government the ability to block the story by endlessly delaying comment.
More broadly the problem here is simply that Weiss has no legitimate authority to make calls like this. She’s never worked as a reporter. The 60 Minutes staff have decades of reporting experience. The only reason she has the job is because a billionaire who is trying to curry favor with the administration installed her there. That context hangs over every decision she makes.
According to the video itself (just finished watching it), that's not true. US officials did respond, telling them to ask El Salvador officials instead, so basically redirecting, rather than "no response". If that's worse or not I guess is left as an exercise to the reader.
> 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. We should spend a beat explaining this.
The story isn't that people found guilty of crimes went to jail, the story is that half weren't even charged with crimes! That's the whole point of the story! We should not be aiming for a balanced diet of criminals and not-criminals in our government-sponsored foreign death camps!
The fact that they exist at all is an affront to humanity, but to say "it's OK because a slim majority deserve it"- I just don't know what to say.
> We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?
What about charged? What does charged with a crime have to do with anything? Why bring that up at all? Do we send people to prison because they were charged with a crime? Is Bari Weiss a newborn baby who has never heard about the presumption of innocence?
I feel sick.
If you can stomach it, propublica has been covering stories like this since the summer [1].
Meanwhile, the MS13 has been cutting sweetheart deals with Bukele [2] and we have been releasing actual gang members for the privilege of sending innocent people to the torture facilities [3, 4], even in the face of reports of USAID being diverted to the gang for a money-for-votes scheme for Bukele [5].
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-men-cecot-inte...
[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/ambassador-ronald-johnson...
[3]https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/news/press-releases/ran...
[4]https://www.npr.org/2025/10/21/nx-s1-5580555/why-the-state-d...
[5]https://www.propublica.org/article/bukele-trump-el-salvador-...
She understands that she's full of shit, and she's paid to be full of shit. The Ellisons aren't spending billions of dollars on this because they want you to be well-informed.
CECOT is a whole different beast altogether, though :(
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...
https://www.newsweek.com/accused-capitol-rioters-could-spend...
Or, does this not count for ideological reasons? There are at least some people out there that may be consistent despite tribalism, I suppose.
I've personally met defendants on their ninth year awaiting trial, and during COVID a lot of jails were forced to publish their detainees lists, and I noted some who were over 11 years without a trial.
People should not be sent to torture camps where they have no hope of every leaving for the rest of their lives for committing crimes.
Only poor criminals. They are all protective of rich white collar criminals, vote for criminal president etc.
I think you don't understand MAGA mentality. Honestly, that's probably a good thing, but understanding MAGA would help understanding this whole situation.
You don’t hold a story because you want to push the government harder to respond, especially when you have the executive’s official spokesperson giving a reason on the record already.
And what does she mean that we should spend a beat explaining that half do have criminal histories? She wants them to give a cookie for that? And why is being charged relevant? You don’t send someone to prison for life for being charged.
Lastly she misstates the administrations legal justification for deportation. She doesn’t appear to be an unbiased actor here.
The fact she sent that out publicly is a good indication of how prejudiced she will be with editorial content.
You had a good run 60 Minutes.
Yup. I was charged with a felony of which I was materially innocent.
But this is the right's spin on things, the "well even if you weren't found guilty, there was enough of an issue to arrest you and charge you".
I was watching a Zoom meeting of one of our local Superior Court hearings - was a motion to revoke or modify bail conditions.
The Judge actually rebuked the prosecutor, who had tried to explain why the motion should go their way. "Blah blah, in addition, the defendant has shown no signs of remorse or regret for the situation..."
Judge: "I'm going to stop you there. The defendant pled not guilty and at this moment no verdict has been determined. In the eyes of the law and this court, they have zero obligation or requirement to show remorse or regret for their alleged actions."
For those not familiar: there were five screenings in the prior week that journalists attended to discuss it. She was aware of those and did not attend.
When she did look at it, her feedback was minor, and they made adjustments.
Then she killed it a day after her delayed feedback, on the weekend it was to air.
That context, combined with the response above, is telling.
She is at absolute best, entirely unfit and amateur for this role combined with dangerous arrogance.
More likely, she is the malevolent puppet of a billionaire ally of the current corrupt administration.
The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.
Which is ironic, considering the actual video that Canadian broadcasters manage to send, it ends with basically "We requested a comment from US officials, but they referred us to speak with El Salvador instead", so even the finish video that got broadcast, acknowledges this basic fact that you need to carry on even if both sides don't want to be interviewed on camera.
All the MAGAs I know on Facebook are posting about how the video is great ("It's about time someone does something!"), so I would think Trump would want the piece to air.
It's abundantly clear why she spiked it. I know it. You know it. We all know it. She was brought in as a clearly partisan voice to put exactly this finger on exactly these levers at CBS. We all saw it when she was hired and we all warned about this. And she did.
I mean, why bother stenographising the excuse? No one is fooled. "Partisan hack does partisan hackery" is like the least surprising line in this story.
Plausible deniability, so that people on one side have something they can use.
(Obviously we believe it isn't plausible, but that doesn't matter in these sort of things)
That is not accurate. It's her excuse for spiking the story.
To me, Bari’s response is a manufactured cover up. I’ve followed Bari for years and seen the progression from someone who was a balanced moderate to someone who is slowly developing a strong bias and letting the mask off a little bit at a time. The recent Turning Point townhall was the first big revelation of her bias to the public. But as someone who subscribed to her for years, I’ve seen the progression over time. And the language in here feels less like her usual journalism and more like something carefully put together to deflect.
As for the actual reason - here is what was shared by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stelter
No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/02/nx-s1-5290171/trump-lawsuit-p...
Not a fan of Trump, Ellison, or obviously this expose being buried, but I am just trying to understand what the FTC did wrong.
> The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation.
I don't think this is the best summary of either the FTC's mandate from congress nor the antitrust laws in the US.
But whatever, it just seems like what you want is not more regulation (Trump is adding lots of regulation on solar and wind, that's good right?), but different regulators.
It sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then makes them governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem.
Okay well I basically copy/pasted from ftc.gov:
The FTC’s Bureau of Competition enforces the nation's antitrust laws, which form the foundation of our free market economy. The antitrust laws promote the interests of consumers; they support unfettered markets and result in lower prices and more choices.
https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/bureaus-offices/bureau-competi...
The Bureau of Competition is committed to preventing mergers and acquisitions that are likely to reduce competition and lead to higher prices, lower quality goods or services, or less innovation
According to data from Thomson Reuters, 2015 is set to be the biggest year ever (once the planned deals close) in worldwide dealmaking, with $4.7 trillion in announced mergers and acquisitions—up 42 percent from 2014, and beating the previous record of $4.4 trillion in 2007.
The year stands out, not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion. Just in the last three months, notable mega-deals include AB Inbev’s acquisition of SABMiller, creating a $104 billion beverage company; Pfizer and Allergan’s announced a $160 billion merger; and the chemical companies DuPont and Dow Chemical Company’s plans to unite as a $130 billion company. Thomson Reuters counted 137 mega-deals last year, which accounted for 52 percent of the year’s overall M&A value.
So if something doesn't benefit society, don't extend that grant to it.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
Seems like a pretty convincing theory to me.
There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.
The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.
Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.
I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)
Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.
Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.
For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.
These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?
The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.
However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
The main problem with your thought process is that your conflating “wealth accumulation” with “wealth creation”!
The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Of course. Politically active billionaires are always famously lobbying for large government and more regulations.
Powerful regulation which answers to the people is the answer.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-cor...
So it's unsurprising there are different optimal anti-corruption government types for different combinations of those qualities.
> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
Which was kind of my point. In reality, the least corruptible types of governments tend to be ones libertarian-skewing Americans would crassly describe as socialist.
I wouldn't exactly call it lightweight government.
Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).
Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.
This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.
> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Politicians already have political power in every country and political system. The blatantly corrupt ones get the death sentence if their provincial or central committee patron can't save them, and those get culled every decade or so, so you can't go overboard.
They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.
> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)
> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.
Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?
Good governance is hard.
I am not sure how the US will find the political will short of getting burned badly enough for partisans to align on reform. How bad does it have to get?
Because the 00s+ US government is in no way propped up by all stakeholding groups in equal amounts.
Many a corrupt government has touted their anti-corruption activities that inexplicably seem to snare almost exclusively their political opponents.
So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.
It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.
Capitalism by it's design, and as outlined by it's original and deepest thought leaders requires strong and decisive government oversight to keep it in check and keep it healthy. Being against strong government oversight is to be against a working, Capitalist system and against traditional Capitalist thought.
The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.
Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him
And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?
Right?
Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang#Kicking_Away_the...>
Recent US tariffs fall rather short on most of these points, of course.
Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.
No, OP lectured us about the evils of free markets and how they need to be regulated... presumably by the same corrupt, captured government he's complaining about. The one who's giving Ellison his orders to pass along to Weiss. Because that's who'll do the regulating, in the world OP is implicitly asking for.
The problem isn't the money or the market. The problem is the power.
Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.
If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.
Perhaps, but right now the only tyrants and cabals I see around me were elected democratically. I don't have to use Facebook or Amazon, but I have to pay taxes to Trump's treasury department.
The fact that stupid people can be easily herded into voting against almost everyone's best interests, including their own, is not an indictment of the free market. If anything, it speaks to the apparently-unresolvable incompatibility of social media and democracy. I'm pretty sure we'll have to give up one or the other before long.
Whatever. He wasn't bothering me until the deliberately-misinformed populace gave him power over me... twice.
Again: the problem isn't the money, the problem is the power.
If I said the problem was religion, I'd rightfully be taken to task. But if I were to call out the effects of evangelical subversion and abuse of protestant Christianity in America, you'd probably find room to agree. It's exactly the same with money.
We aren't going to get rid of either money or religion, but we can say that the Federal government -- and yes, the billionaires behind it -- shouldn't have anything close to this level of power.
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
More significantly, one of the first discussions within the text of precisely what wealth is (on which Smith has several, and occasionally inconsistent, answers, and which he seems to think of as more a flow than a stock.)
One of Smith's principle complaints in his text was what we now call "market failures" and "regulatory capture".
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>
8105370ed7dba50dc7ec659fd67550569b4dd8a0
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/
We're not going anywhere.
—Hydra
I'm honestly speechless. But thanks for the magnet link.
What's the best torrent client nowadays?
I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.
Don’t forget your vpn!
Edited to remove being a moron.
That said protonvpn seems reputable
RTings recently updated their reviews and seems to agree:
(At least not mine, which are old and almost obsolete but have enough RAM)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTorrent / https://apps.kde.org/ktorrent/
Otherwise follow the links from there to qBitTorrent, or its mentions from other commenters here. Am not fond of transmission at all. Feels slow and sluggish in comparison.
Where are the independent and non-VC fueled discussion forums when you need them?
It seems more plausible that David Ellison will bend in whatever direction the wind is blowing.
>"The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun video in front of caged, tatted men."
>"After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to say MAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”"
Etc. And she's been very positive on Bukele personally as well. Might be multiple reasons she'd gleefully want to spike such a story even if the commands of her owners take precedent.
Edit: whew, this one sure triggered the technofeudalists and Baristans! From 3 to -3 for her own publication's and her statements.
----
Here are some parts you left out:
> The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today.
> They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody. Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).
The specific lines about Ellison and a lawnmower start at 38:28 in the linked video; the entire Oracle rant starts at about 34:00.
We need confiscatory taxation for a better future.
No, we can have many targets. People who hoard money for the benefit of themselves with the detriment of society and the population at large are all "destructive aliens who undemocratically ruin everyone’s good time" to borrow the words of parent commentator. If just 10% were slightly less evil and egoistic, it would lead to huge improvements, and only a slight reduction to their own lifestyles. That they don't, is a stain on the legacy of humanity.
We need to bring the entire extraction class to heel. They are degrading, even destroying, society.
They do not really understand how bad Oracle used to be. This is us, old combat veterans, sitting by the fire, describing unspeakable battles to the youth...knowing full well that they think we are exaggerating. :-)
And the most disturbing part is the realization that the Frankenstein monster itself, Larry Ellison, is still out there. Still roaming free. Still very much alive... An eternal, terrifying, lawnmower wielding zombie of enterprise software and government corrupting rent extraction.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/cbs-news-says-global-mi...
If by 'ran the original episode' you mean on TV: no, they didn't, but they did put it on their 'app'.
Considering how much Trump is screwing with Canada, maybe it was someone's small act of revenge.
Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news? Asking for a friend.
HN?
No such thing.
How many just vote Republican without thought as they have always done, how many are in the fox news cult? So many people just thought they didn't want a female president or Trump would lower inflation. It's hard for me to accept that Trump represents America, but he represents enough of it.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/Still a proud supporter of archive.org for many, many years. Their work is invaluable and I hope it stays around forever.
Streisand Effect and all.
Really think you should consider not giving advice to people from a place of ignorance regarding their individual family situations.
It’s predictable that a person who e.g. yells slurs and threatens violence against (whoever they perceive as) gay people on TV is going to progress to actual violence against the gay people in their life, more often than not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
If you want to break this you have to know the person and ask key questions afterwards. Their distortion field is held together by beliefs and principles, not empirical analysis.
For instance, for my father, the question "how is this treating people responsibly? How can we expect the behavior of those guards to be held accountable?" would pierce this ... but really you have to know how the person doing motivated reasoning thinks.
It's about successful communication of authorial intent.
60 Minutes is not trying to say "Justice Served!" and shake pom-poms here. But, someone could read it that way, and it would be unintended.
I have half a century of talking with my father. If you think this is my first strategy as opposed to one that took years of therapy and personal struggle, I dunno what to tell you.
There's a wide body of social and psychological research on this stuff including multiple university departments (communication, psychology, sociology, management, teaching, etc) because "simply talking to people" doesn't actually work.
It's also a very easy job. You don't need to do journalism, be diligent about citations and accuracy, use robust analysis or careful language.
You don't even need a script. Just hop on a hot mic, blame an oppressed scapegoat and see money roll in.
The content is evergreen, trivial to create and performs great!
Just like you don't have to be a doctor to swindle people with phony medicine or a psychology degree to hustle people as a psychic.
The problem is we've taking the smooth talking performative palliatives of these slick mountebanks and christened their confidence games as sacred free speech instead of the hatemonger hustle it is.
And unfortunately, like Albania’s Nationwide Ponzi scam of the 1990s, these crimes have become institutionalized power and their bullshit is bringing the country down with them.
Other than personal gain, what ought be the consequences of arsonists shouting "fire" on the crowded Internet?
TIL
This is disgraceful [0], whatever your opinion on illegal immigration.
[0] deporting non-citizens to 3rd-party countries/prisons
See perhaps United States Declaration of Independence:
> "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
Above is #19; see #18:
> "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Jury trial:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
"Prison" is for people convicted of crimes.
These men were never intended to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT, nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
Kristi Noem indicated publicly that they should stay there "the rest of their lives."
> nor did they. All were released in July 2025 to their home country of Venezuela, and they were in El Salvador for a total of 125 days.
No kidding. Things did not play out that way because the intention was just for a few months of torture for those people before they'd eventually be deported to Venezuela anyway, it was because of the legal and political uproar over what had been done.
Wherever they go, the U.S. taxpayers are stuck footing the bill for their prison stay, food, medical treatment, etc., but why would it need to be in the United States? They have no claim to stay there.
The disgraceful part is sending illegal immigrants without criminal history to maximum-security prisons, sending asylum seekers to prison, or sending anybody to prisons that torture the inmates.
Looks to me like it’s all damage control/pressure valve release stuff designed to distract from any real change. Because SURELY we will get some real change finally, right?? /s
I also wonder if this story will get the type of leeway to stay on HN to collect the 200+ upvotes and 300+ comments of that previous example or if it will be flagged off the front page within minutes like so many other similar stories.
EDIT: No idea how long this post actually lasted, but checking in an hour later to see this has been flagged completely off the first 10 pages of HN despite getting close to that 200 point total.
Also, it’s not unheard of for people working on the op-ed side of the house to become editors in chief. Most notable example I can think of would be Katharine Viner at the Guardian. And in the reverse, James Bennet went from being editor in chief at the Atlantic to running the op-ed page at the NYT.
I suspect she was hired at least in part because she would be willing to take the heat for stuff like this,
She is more or less an Israeli propaganda agent. She was hired at CBS because, after purchasing CBS from Zionist Shari Redstone, Zionist Larry Ellison and his son needed a reliable Zionist editor in chief. Weiss’ primary qualifications are her extremely pro Israeli career path.
Larry Ellison needed a woman like Weiss because he’s invested in Israel’s success. He’s both a close personal friend of Netanyahu and the number one private donor to the IDF. Netanyahu has declared US public perception of Israel as the 8th front of their war, and Ellison (with the help of Trump) is doing his part stateside.
Why we have so many powerful “Americans” exercising their power on behalf of a foreign country is the real discussion here.
The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.
Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.
Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right...
And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.
But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.
Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.
Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.
A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
As much as it would be comforting for all dudes who’re trying their best to pretend otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. (No opinion on whether RFK Jr is in the intersection—I’m not in the US and couldn’t affect his actions if I tried.)
It's both. That's one of the things that's difficult to suss out and therefore have a plan to engage. There's plausible deniability on both ends of that spectrum. Even in the high positions in the administration, there's a smattering of True Believers in amongst the grifters.
> The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador were overwhelmingly violent criminals; Pro Publica reported that the administration knew at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the United States, and six had been convicted of violent offenses.
https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cec...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
Whoever writes the next "Inglorious Basterds" should have a lot of fun parodying Larry...
As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.
More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.
When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian. Now that this is no longer the case, the mindset of appeasing the leader is suddenly a problem.
The whole situation was preventable, but everyone was too high on ZIRP to notice. We could've used the good times to establish good cultural values, but we didn't. Freedom of speech and other foundations of democracy were already rotting long ago but nobody cared. We could've used the good times to allow better dialogue between different political fractions, but we didn't. At some point democrats honestly believed they would simply never lose power again, making it seem pointless to talk to republicans. Now that the money dried out, people suddenly start asking questions and talking about "muh big values".
I have zero empathy.
It is a bit analogous to many of us worrying about Google and others getting so much power. The arguments were quickly dismissed with: "But these folks are responsible, don't be paranoid". The problem with this kind of thinking is, once the power balance changes, you find yourself in a situation you'd never put yourself now. You cannot make Google unlearn what they know about you. You cannot unsend the photos you privately shared on Messenger and force Meta to untrain their facial recognition models. Now all these things you considered a convenience given to you for free can be used against you, and the extend and direction of the abuse is correlated with who is in power.
This issue was not addressed when democrats were in power. They could've passed laws that protect freedom of speech, but they chose not to, because it allowed them to get rid of problematic republicans.
Now that the machine has turned against democrats and you're not allowed to talk about certain topics important to democrats like climate change or CECOT, it's somehow a big fucking problem.
* I purposefully chose a statement that is highly controversial. It would be really cool if we could have social dialogue about controversial things in order to reach a widespread social consensus, instead of having extremist opinions boil in people.
Corruption is not just the immoral acts of an elite few; it is a parasite that hollows out society from within.
When the mainstream realizes that sycophancy toward the autocrat is rewarded, some willingly sacrifice their principles for short-term benefits, burrowing into the system like worms in an apple.
Yet, parasites cannot survive without a compliant host. To kill the infestation, we must cut off the food source: our passiveness. This begins with everyday refusals—denying the petty bribe, rejecting the convenient lie, and defending the honest colleague. By maintaining high ethical standards in our own spheres of influence, we starve the corrupt hierarchy of the dead matter it needs to grow.
We must also make the terrain uninhabitable for them. These organisms thrive in the dark, protected by silence. Therefore, we must actively expose them: documenting abuses, funding media samaritans, and organizing locally to demand transparency. When integrity becomes the standard again, the host becomes hostile to the parasite, isolating the invaders rather than letting them multiply.
Without this resistance however, the society weakens until its greatest assets—its resources, minds, and institutions—are cannibalized by a regime of criminals. This is how nations collapse. We have seen this story in Africa, South America, and Russia. This plague is now upon us. But history is not destiny. We possess the power to stop it. We only need the will to use it.
America isn’t used to corruption. It hasn’t seen societal level rot that corruption can bring since at least WW2.
It’s a deeply damaging phenomenon.
> displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords
The problem is that initially it all looks straightforward and easy. Revealing even, because finally solution is not that complicated anymore. Only afterwards things turn unpredictable and violent, but then it's already irreversible.
I thought he did a great job.
I'd love to hear what others that have seen both think since I'll want to put aside some time to watch this one after all the holiday hustle and bustle are done.
I think it's a great model based on what Nick's tour showed.
A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.
I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.
It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.
EDIT: See, ABC's Matt Rivers was /inside/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol0dcwHCb8Q
The US government, in particular Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio, are, by the logic of the legal power they themselves invoked, war criminals who rightly belong in the Hague.
And the author's Substack has 2 videos of Trump kissing and patting Bill Clinton's groin area (through pants). They are likely AI because I couldn't find anything online about how they're real besides the original photo. And if they were real, why is no one talking about it? He claims for one of the videos that it's real. So it kind of reduced the author's trustworthiness a bit.
CBS defends pulling 60 Minutes segment about Trump deportations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrnv3keeneo
or
‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/business/60-minutes-trump...
It's nauseating, but this is where Republicans live these days. The midterms can't come soon enough.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:734abc77f48d11c78543c52004b6f57db71d6d92&dn=60minutes-cecotsegment&xl=1483256352&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=http://ia601703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=http://ia801703.us.archive.org/32/items/&ws=https://archive.org/download/
Not to mention that these lawsuits are completely frivolous and it just a way to bribe the president
As a noob here on HN, that's what I gathered from your previous comment:
> In the year since, a bunch of their original reporting has hit the front page
So, a year ago, before my time, 404 media was moderated in a way that seemed like a ban, but now it no longer appears to be shadowbanned, is that what I'm learning?
Tell HN: Paywalls with workarounds are OK; paywall complaints are off topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 - Sept 2015 (160 comments)
289 points by grahamlee 5 days ago | flag | past | 171 comments
But: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=404media.co sure has a lot of [dead]
Why do people think we're motivated to “suppress” negative stories about A16Z? They've been criticized forever here and we've never had a problem with it. All we care about is whether a topic makes for an interesting discussion on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
For a while there was a widespread standing principle to not assume malice for actions that could be explained as a simple mistake. If only one person follows this policy, it's great. However, so many people were following this policy that it created massive incentives to disguise profit motivated malice as explainable accidents. We're in the midst of a massive backswing against this.
So, there is very little taste for patience when agents of ycombinator make mistakes that benefit a16z such as accidentally removing them from the title of a negative article, due to the billions of dollars entangling ycombinator with the reputation of a16z. This is not because it wasn't an accident- it's because any culture of patience with this will lead (and has led) to an explosion of copycat whoopsies.
Specifically, how does that title change make any difference to A16Z?
I think a more charitable interpretation of this kind of argument is that the money and power that entities like A16Z have make the possibility of corruption of endeavours like HN trivial.
In light of the ease in which a wealthy entity like A16Z can exert influence over an entity like HN and the track records of various A16Z adjacent/similar people doing similar things to other HN-like entities it's very natural that people are concerned about the possibility of similar things happening here.
Like it or not as an editor at HN you're in a position of power and influence and others with far greater power would certainly leverage what you have here if suited their interests.
Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is no easy task especially in this medium and I don't envy you in taking it on, but it's an essential part of something like HN. If the users in aggregate don't trust the moderation process or the administrators then this all sort of falls apart and the interesting discussion suffers.
What does this mean? Why would a VC firm like this "corrupt" HN and how would they do it? And why would we allow them to do it? What would be the motivation of us moderators to allow it?
Headlines are important. And given that HN has a policy of moderators editing headlines it is really important that mods do a very good job not distorting headlines. This means that your evaluation of the importance of each word in the headline is really important. It concerned me that in your mind the reference to a16z was the least important material in the headline when I suspect that a typical HN participant would see it as among the most important material in the headline.
You’ve continued with the unfalsifiable claims while avoiding the one question that matters:
How does it materially benefit an outside VC firm if the title on an HN post about one of their portfolio companies excludes their name? What is the tangible economic impact?
There doesn't need to be an explicit effort to protect vc firms for your blind spots to shape conversation on this website away from criticizing them.
It's noticeable in this subthread that the accusations rely so much on sweeping, unfalsifiable claims and presumptions about our incentives or blind spots, and Kafkaesque logic that allows no space for simple, benign explanations.
Meanwhile, nobody seems to have examined the core assumption; that a title on an HN discussion thread has any consequence or concern for a firm like A16Z. Can anyone explain, specifically, how title changes like this on HN would benefit an outside VC firm?
I've posted about some and they just get instaflagged or hidden.
I've been watching this 60min piece, and there's nothing wrong with is. It's journalism well done.
Do Trumpist minions have their ways on HN?
Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
It could, but that'd be odd. We've seen oodles of structurally similar posts hang out on the front page unflagged before. There are even past examples of major posts criticizing the journalistic integrity of 60 Minutes. Only once the material becomes critical of the regime does it become flagged.
I am tempted to go over each such complaint on this page (there must be a couple dozen so far) and reply "Quiet, please! People are reading."
A distinction without a difference.
"I stabbed you in the back because I wanted to steal your watch, not because I disliked you personally."
Or the huge cohort who insist that Joe Rogan talking to another guy about how it's not that big a deal that the very existence of gay people is yet again under attack is "Two people having a calm debate of their difference in beliefs" despite that not being true.
There are tons of people on HN that would have done better to spend more time in English class learning about persuasive writing and the pillars of rhetoric and media literacy and all that "critical thinking" they claim school didn't teach them and are currently angry when people rightly call out their poorly supported arguments, and they don't actually seem to know what an "argument" even is.
It's so frustrating their faux "debate" beliefs. It's worse than a decade ago when they thought "debate" was screaming at your ideological opponents a hundred outright false claims that can't be countered in a reasonable time frame.
Nevermind that we HAD calm debate about most of this shit decades ago. But these people only believe a "debate" happened when their beliefs are validated. Otherwise it's "canceling" that thing they still scream about despite doing it all the time.
Also the idea that we should have "calm debate" about the government sending you to another country's prison without trial is insane when that was specifically one of the exact reasons the founding fathers decided to start shooting people over. Thomas Jefferson would not be calm in his rhetoric.
It's not even that good of a story IMO; leading to full-on Streisand effect when it's easier than ever to find things on the interwebs, and double-impossible to suppress them. About all this has done is prevented the 60 minutes demo from viewing a story they would have immediately forgotten, and prompted a far more dangerous to the status quo & resourceful segment to go find & view a show they never watch.
Tbh HN does a _lot_ better dealing with this than pretty much anywhere. Yes HN has the flagging feature so of course it will get abused but as evidenced by this article sitting now at the top of HN, it gets addressed by moderator intervention, regularly.
It's partisan hacks who are somewhere on the spectrum between full support of this barbarity, and finding all the other shit that's being done useful enough to them to be worth compromising their values.
The latter can be identified by 'Well I don't agree with everything this administration does, but I will throw my full support behind <one of the many wedges they are using to turn this country into a corrupt single-party autocracy>.'
(They won't push you onto the tracks because they hate you, they'll push you because it means they'll see a 0.7% drop in their expected tax rate. They are in most ways, worse than the former, because they can tell the difference between right and wrong, and still carry water for the latter, because they see personal benefit in it.)
More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571
I assumed this thread had been axed and manually reapproved. Probably likewise for some of the other people posting inb4s.
What’s your level of confidence that these threads aren’t getting flagged as part of a coordinated effort? Be that a lone MAGA nutter running 20 sock puppets through resnet proxies, or a paid covert influence campaign?
If there were theoretically a common cluster of accounts all repeatedly flagging political posts unfavorable to the Trump admin within a few minutes of each other, do you currently have the tooling in place to see that happen?
I certainly don’t speak for everyone on HN, but I think the allegations of censorship here have more to do with the specter of bad actors abusing the flag system to limit the reach of certain posts, rather than you or anyone else affiliated with Big Ycombinator (TM) putting your thumb directly on the scale.
From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle. (Edit: I mean users who are on one side of a political struggle and only flag stories that are on the opposite political side, in other words who use flags as a purely political weapon.)
This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.
There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.
I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal subset of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complaints seem never to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.
From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo around flagging is not so awful—it is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (though not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.
That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—often they're far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.
When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off flags. This is the best strategy I know, so far, for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.
If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be. That's the fundamental point.
Instead, most arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. None of this engages with the fundamental point. I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, and (2) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose.
After many discussions with users making such objections [1], I get the feeling that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. Anything else is unfair — is censorship, putting a thumb on the scale, and so on. That is the view implied, and often expressed, in these discussions.
There are a ton of reasons why HN doesn't work this way and is designed not to. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political. But it wouldn't be HN. We're optimizing for something else entirely, and there's no way that this kind of site can work by upvotes alone. [2]
Flagging on HN is part of this optimization effort, so if you want to change how flags work, you'd need to show how it would move the site closer to this optimum—the goal we have, rather than some other goal that we don't have. HN is far from that optimum, so there is room for improvement. But we can't optimize for two things.
---
[1] I had a long, unfortunately unsuccessful, exchange with a user about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367653
[2] If anyone wants to understand this better, here are some entrypoints to past explanations:
We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
HN can't operate by upvotes alone - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN is not a current affairs site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The job of moderation is to jig the system out of its failure modes - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
The submission you linked to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
* This is predictable from its skeleton, btw: "person X says provocative thing Y about divisive topic Z" is usually not significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)
I’m excited to see what positive coverage CBS has of this great development in human rights in El Salvador.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
https://x.com/thesimonetti/status/2003142908854313225
They seem reasonable. The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past, which make her concern more relevant.
Briefly, on a couple of them:
- "We then say that only 8 of the 252 have been sentenced in America for violent offenses. But what about charged?" In the US, those people are known as "innocent," whether or not Weiss likes that fact.
- Holding a story until the administration is willing to go on record is exactly the same as giving the administration a veto over a story. We would not have adversarial journalism under these circumstances.
- "The admin has argued in court that detainees are due "judicial review" —and we should explain this" These men were sent for indefinite detention to a concentration camp outside the US borders, and then the administration argued in court that it could not affect any change in their status. This argument from Weiss is transparently false.
Bari Weiss bending over backwards to accomodate an administration that has never shown any sort of honesty or humanity is exactly why she was rewarded so handsomely. "They seem reasonable" is not even remotely close, when comparing "evidence-based truth" reporting with the president's "I speak the truth".
If you wait for the administration to comment on a story before you publish it you’re effectively giving them the right to veto it. You ask, give them a deadline. If they don’t respond or say no comment (as they did in this case) then you publish.
> The person doing this 60 minute segment has also pushed false stories in the past
You’re going to need to elaborate on that. If it were true why wouldn’t Weiss just fire them?
[citation needed]