CBS News’ editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, defended her decision to pull a 60 Minutes episode on allegations investigating a notorious prison in El Salvador, arguing that the network’s priority was to ensure its coverage was “comprehensive and fair”.

In the memo sent to staff on Christmas Eve, Weiss said news organizations needed to do more to win back the trust of the American public and vowed that “no amount of outrage” would “derail us”.

“We are not out to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media,” according to the memo, signed by Weiss and other CBS News leadership and published in full by several media outlets. “We are out to inform the American public and to get the story right.”

The internal battle over the story exploded into public view after CBS announced the segment would not be a part of the show, despite extensive promotion. Weiss’s last-minute decision to hold the episode sparked outrage and charges of censorship amid Donald Trump’s second administration, though some conservative commentators generally aligned with the president have defended the move. In a private email sent to 60 Minutes correspondents that was subsequently made public, CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who spent weeks reporting the episode, called the decision a “political one”.

In the memo to staff, Weiss acknowledged the uproar her decision had caused internally and externally – but she rejected the accusation that politics played a role in her determination to hold the segment.

“Such editorial decisions can cause a firestorm, particularly on a slow news week,” Weiss wrote. “And the standards for fairness we are holding ourselves to, particularly on contentious subjects, will surely feel controversial to those used to doing things one way. But to fulfill our mission, it’s necessary.”

Weiss has said she was concerned about the episode airing without a sufficient response from the Trump administration. But Alfonsi said it had been “screened five times” as well as cleared by CBS attorneys along with its standards and practices department. She also said her team had unsuccessfully requested comment from the White House, the US state department, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi wrote.

The episode has since appeared online, after it was published by a streaming platform owned by Global TV, the network that has the rights to 60 Minutes in Canada. In it, Alfonsi visits the prison in El Salvador and interviews deportees who offered powerful testimony about torture and abuse inside the notorious prison where the Trump administration had sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants from the US in what a federal judge recently ruled was a violation of their due process rights.

CBS’s decision to hold the episode comes amid a widening feud between the Trump administration and 60 Minutes – one of journalism’s most venerated institutions known for hard-hitting investigations. During the 2024 election, Trump declined to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes, then sued the network over how the show handled an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. In a highly controversial move, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, agreed to pay Trump $16m to settle the lawsuit.

Earlier in December, Trump fumed on Truth Social that the network had treated him “far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before”.

“If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” the Republican added. A week earlier, he assailed the show for an interview with his ally turned critic, the outgoing Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called a “very poorly prepared Traitor”, and said of parent company Paramount: “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”

Weiss’s management of CBS has come under sharp scrutiny since she was installed as CBS News’s editor-in-chief by Paramount’s CEO, David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, a Trump ally and donor who is one of the world’s richest people. Paramount also acquired Weiss’s Free Press, the conservative-friendly publication she founded after leaving the New York Times as a columnist, in a reported $150m deal.

Her appointment was met with frustration and concern by CBS’s editorial staff while media watchdogs questioned Weiss’s qualifications to lead the storied news network and raised concerns about further media politicization. Weiss, who built a reputation as a provocative opinion writer and media operator, has no experience working in broadcast television.

Paramount is now waging an extraordinary hostile takeover bid to gain control of Warner Bros Discovery, which had reached a deal to sell its storied film and television properties to Netflix. Trump has made clear that he plans to be involved in the acquisition’s regulatory review process.