Support Techdirt: Where Bari Weiss Is Not Our Editor In Chief

If you’re wondering what independent journalism that won’t bend to White House pressure looks like, you’re looking at it.

On Sunday night, CBS News’ newly imported “editor in chief,” Bari Weiss, killed a 60 Minutes story about Trump’s illegal deportations to a Salvadoran concentration camp—hours before it was set to air. Why? Because it might upset the White House. And because Weiss apparently doesn’t understand how television production works, she waited so long to kill it that it still got sent to foreign partners, meaning the story she tried to bury spread all over the internet anyway.

A perfect Streisand Effect, and a perfect illustration of what happens when you hand editorial control to someone more interested in protecting power than challenging it.

Supporting Techdirt means supporting a news organization that won’t kill stories to please anyone in power. Not now, not ever.

The story itself was pretty typical 60 Minutes fare, and in some ways quite similar to a PBS Frontline piece, Surviving CECOT, that was released a few weeks earlier. The main new ground in the 60 Minutes story was that only about 3% of those Venezuelans illegally sent to CECOT actually had violent criminal records (contrary to what the administration claimed). There was also some further evidence showing that CECOT almost certainly violated the human rights of everyone in the concentration camp.

Here at Techdirt, we’ve been covering the story of the illegal and unconscionable actions of the Trump administration, shipping these men to a concentration camp in El Salvador from the beginning.

While some have demanded that we “stick to tech” when an administration ships human beings to a modern torture camp based on nothing more than having tattoos, that’s everyone’s story to cover. If you want to “stick to tech,” feel free to go elsewhere. And if you want to get White House approved talking points and “view from nowhere” reporting, apparently CBS News is now there for you.

But if you want to know what all of this actually means and why it’s important, stick around.

Here’s the difference between us and CBS News: Techdirt has been around for nearly 30 years precisely because we don’t have a Bari Weiss. We don’t have millions in venture capital or billionaire backers telling us what we can and can’t say. We’re nimble, we’re independent, and we answer to our readers—not to power.

But that independence comes at a cost. The price of a single 30-second TV commercial on 60 Minutes could fund Techdirt for months. And right now, organizations that used to sponsor our work are backing away—not because they disagree with our reporting, but because they’re afraid Trump will come after them for supporting it.

So if you want independent reporting that won’t bend to White House pressure, we need your support. Back us at $100 or more between now and January 5th, and we’ll send you Techdirt’s first-ever challenge coin—commemorating 30 years of Section 230, the law that makes comment sections and social media sharing possible, and which is under constant attack from the very people we’re covering.

Or hell, do it to spite the people who think journalism should serve power instead of challenging it. Either way works for us.

We promise we’ll put it to better use than any of the billionaire owned and controlled media orgs out there.