Postponed '60 Minutes' segment on Salvadoran prison is streamed by Canadian news

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cbs-news-el-salvador-cecot-prison-sharyn-alfonsi-bari-weiss-rcna250618

163•duxup•1mo ago

Comments

takoid•1mo ago

Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024 (543 points, 57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362149 (135 points, 8 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362214 (184 points, 34 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362032 (137 points, 30 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571 (122 points, 7 comments)

randomtoast•1mo ago

And as all of these earlier discussions it will get flagged to death by trump supporters or trump supporter bots.

jadamson•1mo ago

The first one is still on the front page.

takoid•1mo ago

It was flagged off the front page yesterday. I'm not sure for how long, but you can read discussion about this in the thread itself.

jadamson•1mo ago

Fair point. There is actually a site that tracks this, and that post was off the front page for most of its existence:

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=46361024

websiteapi•1mo ago

why do you think it's because of trump supporters, I'm curious if you have evidence of trump affiliated suppression on HN (notwithstanding the actual segment which could certainly be said to be trump suppressed) - maybe people just don't want politics on here. in any case there's one: Cecot – 60 Minutes (archive.org), on the front page anyway.

ryandrake•1mo ago

Obviously, nobody but the HN admins/mods know about flagging or voting patterns, and they don't talk about the details when these kinds of events happen. The most you'll hear is "We looked at it and manually removed the flags." So, it is impossible to provide the evidence you are asking for.

You see this here with other topics, too, not just things some people dismiss as "political". Submit any article that criticizes a certain multi-company tech CEO and it will be instantly flagged off the main page.

websiteapi•1mo ago

so you don't know but you keep saying it's because of pro trumpers...? why spread misinformation. you could just say that it keeps getting flagged without lying.

etyhhgfff•1mo ago

We cant know for sure, because unlike dang we cannot correlate the flags. However, there is something called circumstantial evidence, which can even hold up in court.

You went from curious to accusation of misinformation and lying in just two comments. Thats concerning.

belorn•1mo ago

Since we are talking about circumstantial evidence, lets bring alternative theories to the table so that we know we are not excluding other explanations for the same data.

People who are afraid that they will get attacked if their views do not conform to the majority are more likely to flag an article and move on rather than engage with the discussion. Articles do not require 50% of the participants to flag it in order for it to get flagged, thus this minority will cause articles to get flagged. The more hostile the community get to dissenting opinions, the more articles get flagged, with the most heated topics getting the majority of flagging.

Alive-in-2025•1mo ago

When a certain type of political commenting keeps getting repeatedly flagged, in this case things about oligarchs or conservatives who might have made mistakes and did bad things, it's pretty clear that it's probably conservatives who are complaining about it.

websiteapi•1mo ago

or, more likely - people are flagging because they don't even want politics on here to begin with

sillyfluke•1mo ago

>or, more likely

Yes, argue against unsubstantiated bias with more unsubstantiated bias. Anyone who knows about the high percentage of educated immigrants in the tech sector and who knows the historical importance of immigrants to American innovation could easily find this highly relevant, especially the historical high ratio of successful immigrant founders in SV itself including a couple of white South Africans that come to mind -- at least one of which who seems to have had a less than by-the-book immigrant status and could have been deported in today's climate if someone wished it to be so.

The UK leaving the EU is one of the highest ranked stories on this site for similar reasons no doubt.

websiteapi•1mo ago

this is based on comments on the actual flagged articles - some people say why they flag you know.

UncleMeat•1mo ago

But plenty of other politics regularly reaches the front page without flagging and has done so for years and years and years.

Neil44•1mo ago

It's not immediately clear to me why a news piece on a Salvadoran prison is relevant on HN, I guess that's why the flagging.

estearum•1mo ago

This forum discusses information freedom pretty much all day every day. Now we have a real world example of suppression of information in the US which is rather rare and people (see comments) using technology to evade it.

Alive-in-2025•1mo ago

I wish when stories get flagged it would list who flagged them

tim333•1mo ago

I doubt it's Trump supporters. One flagger who said why was he just flags anything that is politics and not 'hacking'. The official guide is

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The longest discussion of a dozen or so was

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024 (1543 points 530 comments)

skrebbel•1mo ago

I’ve gone through all the previous submission and I still don’t understand what this is about. I mean i can get bits and pieces from the comments but I miss the big picture. I’m neither American nor terminally online, so that might be why.

Who is Bari Weiss? Why does it matter what she thinks? Without watching an hour of American TV, what’s in that episode that she wants it suppressed so bad?

I mean we all know that the US sends people without due process to a Salvatoran prison, that’s (terrible and) not new. So what is, that it gets HN this hotheaded?

zug_zug•1mo ago

Seems shocking and appalling to me. In sure an AI could explain how corrupt this is to you if you feed it the article.

yibers•1mo ago

I am in the same boat as you. I believe it's mainly a Streisand effect

huhkerrf•1mo ago

Bari Weiss is a woman who used to be an editor and opinion columnist at the NYT. She was pushed out of the NYT. Some claim she quit to become a martyr to those on the right, but if you look at what happened, like her co-workers openly insulting her in the company chat, it doesn't look good.

She went on to found a center right online publication. Then she was named the head of CBS News. She's arguably less qualified than most, but she's not as unqualified as others claim she is.

All of this has gotten people really worked up about her.

It's worth noting, I guess, that she's also a lesbian. I only say that because I've noticed that it's most often people who have the "right" social characteristics that get the most aggressive responses. The people criticizing her wouldn't expect a white male to do anything else, but those that step out like Weiss often get the most pushback.

dgacmu•1mo ago

I think you're skipping part of the reason people are annoyed at her: she had consistently claimed that she's trying to advance the case of free speech (her publication was even called "the free press"). So there's a great deal of hypocrisy in her imposing top-down pro-regime censorship on a major news organization.

huhkerrf•1mo ago

That's a decent point, but I left it out for two reasons. One is that she's the head of the news department. Part of her job is to decide what goes out or not. Two is that it isn't clear if it's postponed or not.

Alive-in-2025•1mo ago

I felt like your comment above about Weiss' background was actually misleading because you did leave out the most important current point about her, which is that she appears to be a conservative enforcer and was only appointed to the position because they thought she would block negative things about conservatives. And she has done exactly that in this case.

ZeroGravitas•1mo ago

But her first notable achievement in her career was calling for professors to be disciplined for criticisms of Israel, so that claim to be about free speech was always an obvious lie.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...

TheNewsIsHere•1mo ago

> I only say that because I've noticed that it's most often people who have the "right" social characteristics that get the most aggressive responses. The people criticizing her wouldn't expect a white male to do anything else[...]”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard this idea communicated in this kind of framing. I think it makes your point quite striking.

malfist•1mo ago

The Free Press is the publication she created that you refer to as "center right". I would not characterize it as center anything, it was created with an agenda to push far right narratives, including the elimination of Palestine. The publication primarily focuses on social issues and anti-woke narratives. In particular, it regularly publishes either outright anti-trans people content, or engages in dishonest concern trolling

mcphage•1mo ago

> but if you look at what happened, like her co-workers openly insulting her in the company chat, it doesn't look good

I'm not sure "my coworkers don't respect me" is the same thing as "I got fired".

huhkerrf•1mo ago

You conveniently cut off the first part of that sentence where I said she resigned.

mcphage•1mo ago

> You conveniently cut off the first part of that sentence where I said she resigned.

I left it off because "she resigned" is definitely not the same thing as "I was fired".

xracy•1mo ago

Calling Bari Weiss "Center-Right" has got to be one of the more dishonest characterizations I've read. Or, you're going to need to claim that the Overton window has gone off the far-right deep-end such that the mere presence of a confounding social factor is enough to pull people from being "extreme" to being "Centrist."

I'd love to know what policy/opinion you think is "Moderate" from Bari Weiss, and which opinion piece of hers demonstrates it when compared to the sheer volume of Deep Conservatism she espouses in all of the rest of her work.

> It's worth noting, I guess, that she's also a lesbian...

This bit is solidly poisoning the well, because it gives you the ability to claim that any legitimate criticism about Bari Weiss Kowtowing to the current administration is because she's a lesbian, and not because she's legitimately censoring free speech like everyone claimed the news was doing before she started actually doing it.

comrh•1mo ago

HN is pretty consistently anti censorship

rubyfan•1mo ago

But also trying desperately to not become another divisive hotbed of online flame war.

metalman•1mo ago

yes, but a refusal to at least soberly acknowledge tech's central place in human conflict and it's litteral weaponisation would be another death by capitulation. that this place retains a certain civility whilst ubber geeks, money grubbers, lightly bored acedemics, and every variety of ax grinders have a go, is testement enough. the common denominators bieng drive, curiosity, and however grudgingly to count someone elses point, or let it go. though I will posit that the stakes are higher than just this place, as tech is central to everything now, and figuring that out is everyones respinsibility, so a little heat is guaranteed. Bieng a pyrologist it's something I am comfortable working with, and while I might discuss something hot, I wont shove somebodys head in the flames. no adhominum right.

jeltz•1mo ago

Which is why people flag anything negative about Trump?

ndsipa_pomu•1mo ago

I wonder if a positive story about Trump would similarly get flagged?

delichon•1mo ago

What's the association between censorship and an editor of a publication making an editorial decision about an item? Those appear to be different subjects. Or is it censorship of B when an editor decides to cover A today instead?

If I buy a car with a Make Love Not War bumper sticker and cover it with a Peace Through Strength bumper sticker, I have not committed censorship, but if I don't buy the car first, I have.

zzleeper•1mo ago

Because that editor was installed in order to be able to censor CBS. They also bought Tiktok, and are trying to buy other media companies in order to be able to better control the flow of information.

stvltvs•1mo ago

The head of the news organization pulled an investigative story presumably because the facts it presented either didn't support her own politics, because she was afraid of the current regime's reaction, or because she doesn't know what journalistic standards are for running this kind of story because she lacks experience.

Two of those reasons are a kind of self-censorship for political reasons tied to who is in power. Democracy needs journalism that's ready to stand up to the people in power or we become a state like North Korea where people can't speak the truth.

zingababba•1mo ago

> What's the association between censorship and an editor of a publication making an editorial decision about an item?

kasey_junk•1mo ago

Bari Weiss is a conservative journalist that was appointed to the head of cbs under the appearance of being a suck up to Trump. Trump has attacked critical news organizations aggressively and that includes 60 minutes.

The fear when she was, recently, appointed was that she’d exert editorial control to hide stories critical of Trump. This episode being buried at least has the appearance of this happening.

skrebbel•1mo ago

Appreciate it. Clearly (from other responses) I didnt even understand what I didn't understand and therefore phrased my question badly. This was the context I was missing.

WackyFighter•1mo ago

Bari Weiss is well known and influential Journalist if you are an American Politico, I never found her particularly interesting. Outside of that she doesn't have much name recognition. It is like Glenn Greenwald, if you care about Snowden you probably know who he is.

ludicrousdispla•1mo ago

The 'postponed' 60 Minutes segment is only 15 minutes long...

https://archive.org/details/insidececot

ksynwa•1mo ago

People are upset that an investigation piece on a concetration camp got spiked due to purely political reasons. I am not sure what is confusing about it.

ZeroGravitas•1mo ago

She was also installed in her role by Oracle's Larry Ellison and his son, Paramount CEO David Ellison, which gives it extra tech credentials.

piva00•1mo ago

Which is the connection I think is interesting to be discussed in the tech circles, we all know that Larry Ellison is dangerous from how heavy handed Oracle always has been with lawsuits.

Now that he is part of the inner circles of the US government, and through his son trying to reach into traditional media it significantly increases the damage potential he can do.

Given the quote from him that mass surveillance would "keep citizens in their best behaviour" it's actually frightening he managed to create proxy censorship through CBS, he's not even that far disconnected, it's simply: Larry Ellison -> David Ellison -> Paramount -> Beri Weiss -> CBS.

lurking_swe•1mo ago

as another not-terminally-online person, have my upvote.

tim333•1mo ago

>Without watching an hour of American TV

If you just watch the first five minutes you'll have more idea of why it's bad. The whole thing is 15 mins.

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