Dear Progressive Reader,

The biggest news story of this past week may have been a story of “no news,” when the recently appointed editor-in-chief for CBS, Bari Weiss, decided to kill (or at least hold up) a story on the notorious CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center) prison in El Salvador where the Trump Administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelans and other immigrants to face unbelievably harsh conditions for merely coming to the United States (a number of those deported had absolutely no criminal record). Less than two hours before its scheduled air time (and after it had been publicized as a key segment last Sunday’s 60 Minutes), Weiss, who somewhat ironically had previously founded a media organization called “The Free Press,” ordered that the story be pulled pending the addition of an on-camera comment from a high-level government official. Journalist Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the story, wrote in a letter to her colleagues: “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. If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”

However, the story did not completely disappear into the “memory hole,” rather a version sent to Canada’a Global TV was accidentally sent out over their app as the lead feature in that evening’s program, thereby making it available to audiences who quickly captured the video and shared it worldwide on social media. The fallout of this act of censorship continues for CBS news, making its dedication to “providing the highest quality journalism under standards we pioneered and continue to set today.” much less believable. At The Progressive, we have covered the story of CECOT and the deportation of migrants multiple times over the past year, most recently in an article by Nyki Duda in the newest issue of the magazine. We will continue to do so without waiting on permission from the Administration to cover this news.

This week on our website, Jill Webb reports on the efforts to make college students more literate on the environment and climate; and Glenn Daigon reviews the new documentary film that premiered on the streaming service Netflix yesterday, Cover-Up, which tells the story of renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. I interviewed Hersh in 2018 when his autobiography Reporter: A Memoir came out. As Hersh told me at the time, “We’re in a hyped-up business where news is now dominated by this twenty-four-hour news cycle that’s pernicious. Information that comes directly from the White House is just flushed down the air, not checked, every story has a shelf life of maybe two or three news cycles now, and that there’s no real effort to do any systematic [work].”

Finally, as our annual Hidden History calendar reminds us, Thursday was the 111th anniversary of the Christmas Truce in 1914 during World War I. I told the story of that historic moment in this newsletter four years ago: “December 24, 1914 in the trenches of World War I, a silence fell across the battlefield. According to The New York Times, roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the informal cessations of hostility along the Western Front on that Thursday and Friday . . . . The Manchester Guardian [on January 9, 1915,] the story was first reported after word came home to friends and relatives. ‘Since Christmas, there has come over in the soldiers’ letters home from the trenches in Flanders the news of all those spontaneous little groups of truces which on Christmas Day and its Eve sprang up at intervals all the way down those trenches,’ the paper noted. ‘It was a thing more hopeful . . . . It was the simple and unexamined impulse of human minds, drawn together in the face of a common and desperate plight. In the nature of its evil, war is now as inhuman as a great pestilence or earthquake.’

“This was a lesson that the generals did not want their troops to learn! The immediate response was to rotate those ‘spoiled’ troops out of the field and replace them with new ones, who would not know of these peaceful exchanges. The following week, the paper reported, ‘Early in the morning of Boxing Day [another unit] whose trenches lay somewhat to the rear of the trenches to which the Germans had paid a visit, were ordered to replace the English troops in the front trenches. The explanation was that Headquarters did not consider it advisable for such happenings to take place.’ But the memory of that day—of everyday people choosing peace in spite of their leaders’ passion for war—has lived on, for, as the author of the first article noted, these men had seen ‘how very much saner and wiser [people can be] than the human intelligence which first devises such engines [of war, but] has failed to prevent their being used.’ ”  

Thanks to all of you for your support over the past year, and in the spirit of peace and the hope for a better world ahead, we at The Progressive, wish you all the best in the new year. Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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