’60 Minutes’ Episode Including Postponed CECOT Segment Gets Absolutely Smoked in the Ratings

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CBS’s 60 Minutes episode featuring the long-awaited report on the Salvadoran prison CECOT turned out to be a ratings disaster for the network.

The report, which focused on the inmates sent there as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, was originally set to air nearly a month earlier in late December. Hours before the episode went live, however, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss made the decision to pull the report. The move sparked outrage within CBS News and across the media industry, with some accusing Weiss of yanking the segment because it would make President Donald Trump look bad.

In a company memo, Weiss explained that her decision was motivated by the fact that the segment did not include voices from the Trump administration. This past Sunday, the episode finally aired — and those voices were still absent. According to 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, the administration repeatedly denied interview requests and referred all questions to CECOT officials and the Salvadoran government.

The episode struggled to attract a significant audience, earning an average viewership of just 4.9 million total viewers. It marked a staggering 41% decrease from CBS’s 60 Minutes episode from two weeks earlier (8.3 million) and a 38% decrease from 60 Minutes’s average viewership for 2025 (7.9 million).

Some in the industry have speculated this may have been by design. As noted in a report from Awful Announcing, this past Sunday’s episode had to compete with an NFL playoff thriller between the Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears on NBC. The game kicked off around 6:30, meaning it was on throughout the entire duration of 60 Minutes. The belief is that Weiss and other CBS executives surely factored that into their decision, thus minimizing the potential audience to watch the CECOT report.

CBS News coded the epsiode different from a standard 60 Minutes episode, by labeling it 60 Minutes Presents — an apparent effort to keep the low ratings for the episode out of the Nielsen ratings average for the show.

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