More layoffs could be coming at CBS News.
Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is considering cutting at least 15 percent of the staff, Variety and Status reported Thursday, following an October “bloodbath” of dozens of staffers by CBS’s MAGA-friendly parent company, Paramount Skydance.
The downsizing, which insiders say could happen between March and May, is coming largely from Weiss, the anti-woke, Trump-kissing opinion journalist whom David Ellison hired to make CBS more palatable to conservative audiences, according to Status.
That outlet notes that the layoffs are indirectly funding Weiss’s focus on video and commentary, as evident in the recent hiring of podcasters as contributors. (One contributor, Peter Attia, has appeared in the Epstein files, but Weiss has kept him on.) Additionally, Weiss has reportedly floated “sizable” base salaries to potential additions to that side of the operation.
The Daily Beast has reached out to representatives for CBS News and Weiss for comment.
Weiss, according to a January New York Post report, was considering firing 60 Minutes correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley, both of whom have criticized Weiss’s leadership.
While layoffs are on the table, some at CBS News have chosen to take buyouts offered last month rather than stay on.
Eleven staffers behind CBS Evening News, which has been helmed by MAGA-coded anchor Tony Dokoupil since the beginning of the year, took that path.
One such producer, Alicia Hastey, wrote in an exit letter to her colleagues that journalists at the network are forced to “self-censor or avoid challenging narratives” under CBS’s Trump-friendly leadership.
Hastey wrote that “there has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism.”
“The truth is that commitment to those people and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible,” she said. “Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”
That, she continued, created “a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
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