These past few days, we have seen a perfect illustration of “the Streisand Effect.”
Perhaps you are among the few people in the nation who doesn’t know what that term refers to. I asked around and found friends who had never heard of it.
In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued an aerial photographer and the company he worked for when she learned that her house in Malibu had been photographed as part of the California Coastal Records Project, to document coastal erosion. Her home was part of a collection of 12,000 photographs. She sued for $50 million for “invasion of property.” Before she sued, the image had been downloaded only six times; after she sued, it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. A judge dismissed the case and required her to pay $177,000 to the folks she sued for their legal expenses.
The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
So here’s the Streisand Effect in action, before our very eyes. Bari Weiss, the new “editor-in-chief” at CBS News, saw the report called “Inside CECOT” that “60 Minutes” planned to air last Sunday. After careful review, the segment was heavily promoted as a coming attraction.
Then Bari Weiss decided to yank it.
Consequently, the story of censorship exploded and got far more attention than if the show had aired as planned. Bootleg copies of “Inside CECOT” are in many corners of the Internet, sent from Canada, where the show played before it was spiked.
If it had aired on schedule, there would have been no mention of it in every major news outlet.
The story, if you can open the WSJ, features drawings of a beachfront ringed by futuristic high-rise luxury buildings, harbors with yachts, a dreamscape replacing a devastated landscape. It’s reminiscent of the video released by the White House last year that showed Trump and Netanyahu stretched out on beach chairs on the Gaza beach, enjoying their drinks in the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The curious part of this fantasy is the claim that that this the cost will be $112 billion.
The presentationhas been shared with the leaders of oil-rich Arab nations.
The unsolved problem: what to do with the 2 million homeless Gazans.
Welcome to “Project Sunrise,” the Trump administration’s pitch to foreign governments and investors to turn Gaza’s rubble into a futuristic coastal destination.
A team led by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, two top White House aides, developed a draft proposal to convert the bombed-out enclave into a gleaming metropolis. In 32 pages of PowerPoint slides, replete with images of coastal high-rises alongside charts and cost tables, the plan outlines steps to take Gaza residents from tents to penthouses and from poverty to prosperity.
The presentation is labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” and doesn’t go into details about which countries or companies would fund Gaza’s rebuilding. Nor does it specify where precisely the 2 million displaced Palestinians would live during reconstruction. The U.S. has shown the slides to prospective donor countries, U.S. officials said, including wealthy Gulf kingdoms, Turkey and Egypt….
In looking around, trying to learn more about Sharyn Alfonsi, I came across a commencement address she delivered at the journalism school at the University of Mississippi. It is hilarious!
She offers an abundance of wit, mingled with great career advice for aspiring journalists.
You get insight into the character of the “60 Minutes” reporter who spoke out and stood up to her bosses when they censored her reporting about CECOT, the terrorist prison in El Salvador.
As Dan Rather said, Sharyn Alfonsi is “One Courageous Correspondent.”
Dan Rather, legendary newsman, spent decades at CBS. Now, in retirement, he continues to have good sources at the network. In his blog “Steady,” he explains the back story of the censorship of the “60 Minutes” expose of inhumane conditions at the prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration sent alleged terrorists.
CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is walking the walk.
What she has done for journalism in the last two days is about as important, and courageous as it gets. With her cherished journalistic institution threatened, and her career on the line, Alfonsi is sounding the alarm that “60 Minutes” is sliding further into an increasingly irretrievable and dark place.
The Steady team spoke to sources inside the broadcast today to find out exactly what happened when the new CBS News boss, Bari Weiss, spiked a highly promoted piece at the last minute.
On background, we learned that Alfonsi and producer Oriana Zill de Granados had for months been working on a story about the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
They interviewed former inmates about the brutal and torturous conditions inside the notorious prison. This is the place where Trump sent hundreds of Venezuelans he alleged were terrorists with gang ties. Human Rights Watch found that the 252 men were subject to “arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance.”
As part of the reporting, they repeatedly asked the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department for comment, but received no response. That is no surprise since this story would be another black mark on Trump’s draconian immigration agenda.
Last Thursday, after the story had been fully fact-checked and legally vetted by CBS lawyers and its Standards and Practices team, the piece was screened for a fifth and final time for CBS News executives. Weiss was supposed to attend but did not.
She did, however, screen the story several hours later. At 11:50 p.m. Thursday, Weiss emailed the broadcast’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, outlining a few issues she had with the piece that she called “incredibly powerful.”
On Friday morning, Alfonsi made several changes to the script to address Weiss’s concerns, believed it was ready for air, and recorded her in-studio introduction
The listing of Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” pieces was released, which included Alfonsi’s “Inside CECOT.” Promos began to air, including on social media. The “Inside CECOT” clip on Instagram quickly racked up 4 million views, significantly more than usual.
But by Saturday morning, something changed. In an unprecedented move, Weiss reached out to Simon again. Her biggest issue now was the lack of response from the Trump administration. It was the first time she raised this concern.
“I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record,” Weiss wrote. She even provided phone numbers for Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies, and border czar Tom Homan.
Not long after, Weiss killed the story, though promos kept running and the piece was still listed as airing.
Late on Sunday afternoon, just three hours before air time, “60 Minutes” posted an editor’s note on social media: “The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast.”
Within two hours, Alfonsi sent an email to her fellow correspondents and the production team that worked on the piece. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met — is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she wrote.
She continued, “Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”
Alfonsi then addressed Weiss’s issue with the administration’s decision not to respond. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. 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 is the definition of courage. Kudos to her for speaking truth to power. The hard-won reputation of America’s most trusted television news program, and a big-time money maker for Paramount, is suddenly on the line.
During the CBS News morning editorial call on Monday, Weiss defended her decision. “I held a ‘60 Minutes’ story because it was not ready… We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera.”
Nothing happens in a vacuum in Trump World. The killing of the CECOT piece is no exception.
In August, David Ellison, the scion of Oracle founder and Trump supporter Larry Ellison, purchased CBS parent company Paramount. The acquisition by Ellison’s Skydance needed administration approval, which Trump’s regulators signed off on to the deep-pocketed Ellisons.
They signed off only after CBS agreed to settle a specious lawsuit in which Trump accused the network of deceitfully editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign.
As per usual, Trump’s warm and fuzzy feelings toward his sycophants was fleeting.
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump posted on social media last week.
Friday night, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump said, “I love the new owners of CBS. Something happens to them, though. ‘60 Minutes’ has treated me worse under the new ownership… they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”
How Trump feels about the Ellisons is especially important right now as Paramount Skydance attempts a hostile takeover of another media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery. And once again, the Ellisons, who have been major donors to Trump, need governmental approval.
The president’s hatred of the revered news magazine seems to have been rekindled by a recent Lesley Stahl interview with the president’s newest nemesis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Right after that interview aired, he posted, “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP. Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”
Not coincidentally, “Bari Weiss got personally involved,” with stories about politics after the Greene interview, a “60 Minutes” insider told CNN.
This brings us back to Alfonsi’s piece, which had the unfortunate luck of being scheduled to air the evening before David Ellison upped his bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Staying in Trump’s good graces is, well, paramount at the moment.
The day Skydance bought Paramount was a dark day for CBS News and journalism as a whole. When Weiss, with no television reporting or news production experience, was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief, my heart sank again.
If the Trump administration doesn’t want to comment, they won’t, and didn’t. It happens dozens of times a day, every day to every journalist trying to cover this facts-adverse administration. No amount of wishing, or asking, or begging will make it happen. Weiss’s knee-jerk reaction was just an excuse.
The day has been filled with talk of journalists walking away from “60 Minutes.” As one insider told us, we have got nothing left but our integrity.
What happened to Alfonsi’s piece is no less hard to take even though anyone could see it coming. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They have breached the walls and are now running the show.
This is a gift article that appeared in Bloomberg News. It describes the dramatic changes that Trump has made by executive order to redirect the flow of money.
It’s unlikely that Trump wrote these orders or even understood their implications. He is surrounded by people who know precisely what they are doing: windfalls for the rich.
Andy Spears, veteran journalist based in Tennessee, writes about “reformers” plan to undermine and disrupt public schools in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis appears to be the latest front in the ongoing battle to “disrupt” public education so much that it doesn’t exist anymore.
WFYI reports on a new governing body created to “bridge” the provision of services between Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and the city’s charter school sector.
In an 8-1 decision Wednesday evening, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance recommended establishing the nine-member corporation. If approved by state lawmakers, this new agency called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, would act as a logistical bridge between the district and charter schools, managing unified busing, enrollment, and facility use.
While the IPS School Board will remain intact, the new agency will have significant authority to manage interactions between the Board and charter schools.
Some see this as the beginning of creating an unaccountable agency to further advance school privatization in the district.
During public comment, many spoke out against taking any power away from the IPS Board. Some suggested the board should oversee the transportation needs of charter schools. And others painted the ILEA members’ process as undemocratic.
WFYI explains how charter schools work in Indiana:
Charter schools are tuition-free public schools managed privately by nonprofit boards rather than elected officials. These boards operate under contracts granted by one of several authorizers in the state.
A parent representative on the group that reviewed proposals and recommended the new governing agency expressed skepticism:
The recommendation also drew sharp criticism for lacking specifics. Tina Ahlgren, the appointee representing district-managed school parents, cast the sole vote against it.
“I find my biggest reason to vote no is the level of ambiguity in the plan,” Ahlgren said. “I find these recommendations falling into this bizarre zone of simultaneously feeling both too much and not enough, bold in some areas but overly timid in others, with vague promises that the ecosystem will sort itself out.”
The proposal must now be approved by the Indiana General Assembly.
The Indianapolis move comes at a time when national forces are seeking full privatization of public schools, with some in the Trump Administration’s education leadership suggesting public education should all but end within 5-6 years.
In states like Tennessee, advocacy groups are launching efforts to disrupt public education so much it is effectively a thing of the past.
·And, Indiana is not without its own challenges in maintaining a functioning system of public schools alongside a range of private options.
Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Programallows families to use state dollars that would have followed their child to a traditional public school to instead pay for a private, parochial or nonreligious school.
The state releases this report annually, and for the 2024-25 school year, it showed that the state spent around $497 million on the program, which is an increase of just over $58 million from the previous school year.
Just a few years ago – in 2017 – the Indiana school voucher scheme cost the state $54 million. Now, the year-over-year increase in voucher expenses exceeds what the entire program cost just 8 years ago.
As has been widely reported, CBS’ “60 Minutes” announced that it would release a program about the notorious prison in El Salvador– CECOT–where the U.S. sent migrant prisoners, who were allegedly hardened criminals, “the worst of the worst.”
The program interviews released prisoners, who describe torture, beatings, and inhumane conditions that would never be permitted in U.S. prisons. It also reviewed records and concluded that few of those sent to CECOT were hardened criminals or terrorists.
Bari Weiss, the editor-in/chief of CBS News, stopped the release of the segment because no one in the Trump administration agreed to respond to it. Critics said that if that was legitimate grounds for blocking a story, the Trump administration could block all critical coverage by refusing to comment.
After CBS was sold to the Ellison billionaires, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss to be editor-in-chief and bought her website “The Free Press” for $150 million. Weiss has no experience in the broadcast industry.
Apparently the show aired in Canada, where a viewer copied it and posted it on Reddit.
Here is the link on Reddit. Decide for yourself whether Weiss was right to stop the show until someone from the Trump administration commented.
The 60 minutes interview that was not aired in the US was aired and recorded in Canada and posted on YouTube. It has since been taken down. No worries though, I screen recorded it.“
See it before it is taken down.
It was originally posted on YouTube but was taken down.
Trump filed a lawsuit against the board of the Pulitzer Prizes in 2022, demanding that it retract any prizes awarded to reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post who covered the investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia in his first term.
Trump refers to the episode and the FBI’s investigation as the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”
The Pulitzer board issued the following response:
A Statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefullyreviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Bothreviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.
The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.
The case has dragged on. Recently the board of the Pulitzer Prizes announced a new twist. It has asked Trump to provide full records of his medical history, his psychological tests, and his income tax returns since 2015.
Trump might rethink this particular lawsuit. Other groups sued by the litigious Trump should scrutinize the Pulitzer board’s strategy.
Australia took the extraordinary step of banning access to social media for children under 16. This article explains their rationale and the steps the government is taking to enforce the ban.
It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. would impose such a ban. We can’t even get parents to agree to vaccinate their children, even though the safety of vaccines has been demonstrated for decades. Some parents would oppose a ban because they want to know their children can contact them in the event of a crisis or emergency. Maybe Australia will develop cell phones that permit communication only between parents and children, children and 911, controlled by parents, not the big tech companies.
Madison Burgess writes:
The world’s first social media ban begins today (December 10), and people are already flagging problems.
If you missed the news, don’t panic. It currently only affects under-16s in Australia, so if you’re elsewhere in the world, feel free to scroll to your heart’s content.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed the rule but warned the implementation would be difficult.
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp: “This is the day when Australian families are taking back power from these big tech companies, and they’re asserting the right of kids to be kids and for parents to have greater peace of mind.
“This reform will change lives. For Australian kids… allowing them to just have their childhood. For Australian parents, enabling them to have greater peace of mind.”
CNN reported that South Korea’s crucial national test contained questions so difficult that the top official resigned. And, of course, there was no end to the parents and students who expressed their outrage about exam questions that were hopelessly obtuse. To read the exam questions, open the link.
Imagine this: You’re a South Korean teenager taking a notoriously grueling 8-hour college entrance exam. You’ve been prepping for this for months, perhaps years. You reach the English portion, and you see this:
If you thought that was difficult, how about this?
These were among the questions students faced in the exam – known locally as the Suneung – this November, which prompted such intense outcry that the exam body’s top official stepped down last week, according to public broadcaster KBS.
The exam body even issued a formal apology earlier this month, saying it “takes seriously the criticism that it did not meet the appropriate level of difficulty… for the English portion.”
The body “deeply apologizes for causing concern to the test takers and parents,” the statement said, adding that administrators would consult schools to “create questions within the scope of school education.”
But many angry test-takers and parents say an apology isn’t enough to make up for the damage in test scores and college applications – which are often seen as the key to a successful future in hyper-competitive South Korea.
Only about 3% of test takers earned a top score in the English portion – the lowest since a new grading system was introduced in 2018, according to the exam body.
“The former head of the evaluation admitted the faults, as he resigned,” wrote one online user surnamed Choi on the Suneung’s website. “Is it not common sense to come up with a measure for test takers and parents, who are the victims impacted by the fault?”
“How can an investigation saying what they will do for next year’s entrance exam comfort the test takers that are discouraged this year?”
‘Killer questions’
The Suneung has long been famed for its difficulty and the intense pressure it places on young teenagers. For many, the education rat race begins before they can even talk, with parents racing to secure coveted spots in elite preschools.
By the time students are in middle and high schools, their days often revolve around studying – going straight from regular classes to after-school cram centers known as hagwons until late at night. All this hard work, families hope, can secure them a spot at a top university, and an advantage in the similarly ruthless job market.
It’s not just the families – the whole country takes this exam seriously.
Passengers walk past an information board showing delayed flights at Gimpo airport in Seoul on November 13, on the day of the annual college entrance exam. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
On November 13, as more than half a million students nationwide sat down for the Suneung, all flights across the country were barred from taking off or landing for half an hour to make sure there were no noisy distractions during a listening comprehension section. Financial markets opened an hour late and police were mobilized to make sure candidates could make it to their test venues on time.
But there’s a danger to such highly competitive tests: they are often viewed as both a symptom and contributor to wealth inequality, with richer students able to access more resources that could give them a leg up.
There’s also an illicit market involved. Police booked 126 people earlier this year on suspicion of selling Suneung questions to hagwons and tutors, according to Yonhap News Agency.
The heavy burden on students is frequently blamed for poor mental health in the country, which had the highest suicide rateamong OECD nations in 2020, the latest figures available.
It may influence the country’s steeply falling fertility rate, too.
Experts believe the staggering tuition expenses are a major factor behind South Koreans’ reluctance to have children – along with other burdens like long working hours, stagnant wages and sky-high housing costs.
The government has tried to crack down on hagwons to even the playing field, and to lower the difficulty of the entrance exam.
In 2023, it announced it would remove so-called “killer questions” from the Suneung, which sometimes included material that isn’t covered in the public school curriculum – which, the then-education minister argued, gave an unfair advantage to those who can afford private tutoring.
Clearly, however, even the questions that remain may be too much.
“I’m so angry,” wrote a commenter surnamed Jung on the exam body’s website. “What are you going to do with the kids’ lives?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 