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press freedom
'Let's Call This What It Is: Censorship': Fired '60 Minutes' Journalists Speak Out
Cecilia Vega, one of several journalists ousted from the show, said many of her colleagues "have had to fight to maintain editorial independence" under CBS News' new Trump-aligned corporate owners.
May 29, 2026
A group of veteran “60 Minutes” journalists was fired on Thursday as CBS News’ recently installed right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, moves to reshape the network in her image. Some of the ousted employees are describing their mass firing as a clear act of political “censorship.”
News had already broken earlier this week that correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was on the way out after more than ten years on the flagship news program, after she'd publicly criticized Weiss' decision to delay her story on the Trump administration's deportation of immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran torture prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), late last year.
But Alfonsi's departure was rumored to be part of a larger shakeup by Weiss, who has been accused of molding the network into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration following the government-approved acquisition of CBS's parent company, Paramount, by billionaire David Ellison, owner of Skydance.
On Thursday, the hammer finally fell. In addition to the formal firing of Alfonsi, The Washington Post reported that Weiss had also fired Tanya Simon, who’d worked on the show for a quarter-century and had recently taken on the role of executive producer. Correspondent Cecilia Vega—who had also covered CECOT for the network before Weiss' arrival—was canned as well, even though her contract was not set to expire until March 2027. So was executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski said the firings were the result of them “building a show that thrives in the 21st century.”
“That requires a new approach,” they said, outlining their goals of “expanding ‘60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined ‘60 Minutes’ at its best.”
To fill the role of executive producer, Weiss brought in a network outsider, Nick Bilton, a former technology columnist at The New York Times and producer of documentaries for HBO and Netflix. Weiss called him “one of the most entrepreneurial journalists of our time and the perfect leader for one of the most entrepreneurial news brands of all time.”
Though Weiss reportedly viewed Simon as a “bad leader” who “couldn’t control the staff,” according to one source who spoke anonymously with The New York Post, Simon announced her departure with warm words for those who’d continue working on “60 Minutes.”
“While leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter—I want to be unequivocally clear about one thing: It has been an immense privilege to lead this broadcast, and I could not be prouder of what we have built, fought for, and delivered together over the last year," Simon said in a statement published Thursday. "'60 Minutes' has always been more than just a broadcast: It is an institution built on independence, grit, and rigorous search for the truth.“
But Vega gave a more candid explanation for her and her colleagues' firings.
"In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories," she said in a statement Thursday. "Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions."
"Let's call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven," she continued. "It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."
Vega's criticisms mirror those made earlier this week by Alfonsi, who said her firing was "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting."
In December, Weiss abruptly pulled Alfonsi's story featuring the testimony of some of the men who were tortured in the CECOT prison shortly before it was set to air, citing a lack of commentary in the segment from Trump administration officials, who had repeatedly ignored the journalists’ requests for an interview. At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss had effectively given the government a “kill switch” on critical reporting. The segment eventually went to air the next month with some editing.
Following her ouster on Thursday, Vega described her own efforts to oppose what she viewed as politically-motivated meddling by network higher-ups.
"I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience," she said. "I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity."
“I am far from the only ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?'" Vega added.
She said she was proud of her work at '60 Minutes' and cited her reporting on CECOT for the program, which won a DuPont Columbia journalism award, as one of her finest achievements.
Weiss' overhaul of '60 Minutes' comes as Ellison eyes the merger of Paramount with another major media conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
President Donald Trump has said it's “imperative” that any acquisition of Warner Bros. includes CNN and has publicly denounced a rival bid for the company by Netflix.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice appeared ready to approve a $110 billion takeover by Paramount following meetings with Ellison and other company executives.
A group of journalists—including tech reporter Kara Swisher, former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, and NBC News legal analyst Katie Phang—warned at an event hosted earlier this week by a coalition of press freedom groups that, especially in the wake of Alfonsi's firing, the government-approved consolidation of media posed a dangerous threat to the future of journalistic freedom.
“I think what’s happening right now is pretty dangerous,” Acosta said. “To essentially announce the departure of Sharyn Alfonsi from 60 Minutes is a very in-your-face move by some people who don’t care very much about the First Amendment.”
“Folks need to use a little bit of their imagination here to recognize what may be coming down the pike,” he said, warning that the Trump administration was building a “strange oligarchical empire… attempting to do state media.”
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Critics Say Trump NDA Requirement Would 'Kneecap Whistleblower Protections'
The lone intent of the new policy, said one watchdog, "would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.”
May 26, 2026
The Trump administration—the self-styled “most transparent administration in history”—plans to require all federal government employees to sign nondisclosure agreements in what it claims is an effort to stop damaging information from leaking, but what critics warn is a cynical effort to subvert accountability and hide malfeasance.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday on a draft notice posted to the Federal Register by the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is expected to be published on Wednesday.
Consistent with the Trump administration’s efforts to squash negative reporting on its endeavors, the new rule contains a sweeping order that would ban federal employees from going to the press with any information deemed “confidential.”
Notably, this is different from the typical designation of "classified" vs. "unclassified." It encompasses “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law.”
Both current and former employees would need "written permission from an authorized agency official" to speak to the press about matters deemed "confidential" under the draft's terms, or they could be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
It will be up to individual agencies whether they require employees to sign the NDAs, but the document said doing so would "promote consistency across government, better protect confidential information, and better inform federal employees of their rights and obligations regarding confidential information."
Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has already enacted a strict NDA that “prohibits the release of non-public information without approval or through a defined process," which it enacted late last year along with random lie-detector testing aimed at finding leakers.
The draft notice reported on Tuesday suggests a similar requirement will become blanket policy across a wide swath of agencies. The notice gives an idea of what sorts of information the administration wants to shield from journalistic scrutiny.
The document cites the unauthorized leak in February 2025 of information about the Department of Homeland Security's mass deportation targets in Los Angeles and Aurora, Colorado, which led then-Secretary Kristi Noem to start subjecting employees to polygraph tests to root out leakers.
Another whistleblower in January published identifying information for about 4,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol employees.
The draft also pointed to disclosures to the New York Times and Washington Post, giving the outlets advanced notice of the planned US raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro in January, which the outlets waited to publish until after the illegal operation was complete.
The NDA proposal is the latest attack on critical journalism by the Trump administration, part of a pattern to assert stricter control over the flow of information to the public.
The Pentagon has sought to strip credentials from outlets unless they agree to only publish approved information. Trump and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr have threatened the broadcast licenses of networks that give Trump negative coverage and opened investigations into them. Trump, meanwhile, has personally launched unprecedented multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against media outlets, many of which judges have thrown out of court due to lack of merit.
In a statement sent to Common Dreams on Tuesday, Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the proposed NDA requirement "not just absurd" but "unnecessary and dangerously secretive."
“This policy, from a president who has previously attempted to impose oppressive, corporate-style confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements on federal employees," Harper said, "would kneecap whistleblower protections, undermine the First Amendment, and wrongly inhibit the public’s right to know.”
OPM Director Scott Kupor defended the requirement. “In much of the private sector," he told the Post, "employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard.”
But critics argue that the federal government doing the same poses potential First Amendment violations. Although federal whistleblower laws protect employees’ ability to go to the press about waste, fraud, and abuse, experts told the Post that the NDA proposal could, in practice, be used as a “catchall gag order” that could lead employees to feel their jobs are in danger if they speak out.
“Trying to force the entire federal government to adopt the Trump organization’s aggressive use of NDAs won’t make anybody safer and won’t improve agency processes," Harper said. "Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.”
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the NDA proposal shows the Trump administration is continuing "its efforts to silence federal employees.”
“This proposed rule," said Kelley, "sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm. Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment."
"OPM claims the form will be ‘optional’ for agencies to use and merely restates existing law," Kelley added. "We know that will not be true. OPM will pressure agencies to make the NDA mandatory and then fire employees who refuse to sign it."
He said the rule change was unnecessary because there are already "extensive policies and procedures" to prevent classified and privileged info from being leaked.
Kelley said, "This proposed rule sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information, extending restrictions to the very material the public relies on to learn when an administration is causing harm."
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When Trump Targets the Media, the World's Autocrats Are Taking Notes
Trump's words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.
May 21, 2026
Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.
In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.
At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.
Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.
Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.
Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.
Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.
Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.
Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.
While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.
Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.
Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.
At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.
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