Sharyn Alfonsi will no longer be a 60 Minutes correspondent after CBS News let her contract lapse.
Alfonsi, in December 2025, was at the center of a controversy involving CBS News’ recently appointed editor in chief, Bari Weiss, temporarily shelving her 60 Minutes story around the Trump administration deporting Venezuelan men to the maximum security prison CECOT in El Salvador.
According to The New York Times, Alfonsi’s term with CBS News came to an end on Saturday, and her agent has not heard from the news network about signing a new contract over the past several weeks.
In a terse statement shared on social media, Alfonsi says CBS News’ refusal to offer her a new contract should not be viewed as a “routine corporate transition,” but rather a “deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
She accused the network of abandoning 60 Minutes’ mission of “fearless independent reporting,” and the journalist said that the management team at CBS News has chosen “access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it.”
Alfonsi went on to say that the wall separating CBS News’ editorial independence from CBS’s corporate interests has started to be “methodically torn down.”
Sharyn Alfonsi releases the following statement on CBS News essentially ghosting her:
“This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 12:13 PM
TVNewser reached out to CBS News for comment regarding Alfonsi’s departure, but has received no response as of publication.
Back in December, Weiss defended her decision to abruptly pull the CECOT story from the schedule because it “did not advance the ball” and needed more, including getting a response from a government official.
“This is 60 Minutes,” Weiss reportedly said. “We need to be able to make every effort to get the principals on the record and on camera.”
