NEW YORK — CBS News has declined to renew its contract with correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Alfonsi confirmed the expiration of her deal in an interview with The New York Times published Wednesday.

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Alfonsi told The New York Times. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

Alfonsi’s final segment for the newsmagazine aired in January and examined the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, in Tecoluca. The report included interviews with deportees who described torture and physical and sexual abuse at the facility. The broadcast followed a last-minute postponement in late December.

Alfonsi claimed the December delay was “not an editorial decision” but “a political one.” On December 22, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss said she held the story “because it was not ready,” according to a source. Weiss also told CBS News staffers, “While the story presented powerful testimony of torture at CECOT, it did not advance the ball—the Times and other outlets have previously done similar work,” according to a source.

Alfonsi made her debut on the newsmagazine in 2015 and continued to appear through the end of its 58th season, which concluded May 17. She is the second correspondent to exit the show since Weiss became top editor at CBS News. Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS, acquired Weiss’s website The Free Press and hired her as editor-in-chief of CBS News in October. Weiss is a former opinion writer and editor at The New York Times and launched The Free Press in 2021.