CBS News is losing around $50 million a year, prompting incoming CEO David Ellison to propose cuts in an attempt to “right-size” the company, according to a report.
Puck‘s Dylan Byers reported the staggering figure, citing two sources familiar with the news division’s finances. Ellison, the Skydance Media CEO who acquired CBS parent company Paramount earlier this month, isn’t “likely to invest in growing” CBS, according to Byers, and “certainly isn’t going to tolerate those losses.”
Ellion’s plan is “to right-size CBS News, bring down talent salaries, require smaller teams to work on smaller budgets, maybe leverage evergreen 60 Minutes packages on Paramount+, and hopefully lure Bari Weiss into the mix to shake things up a bit,” Byers reported.
The $50 million losses are “especially notable,” Byers wrote, given CBS parent company Paramount’s decision last month to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for losing the company $40 million a year. While left-leaning staffers and hosts lashed out over the decision, the company insisted that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.”
CBS and Paramount also made news last month for paying $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit alleging that 60 Minutes deceptively edited footage to make Kamala Harris appear more coherent and boost her presidential campaign.
In addition to the settlement, Trump has referenced a “side deal” that he says will see CBS air millions of dollars in free conservative advertising and public service announcements under CBS’s new parent company, Skydance. While Paramount’s board denied such a deal, Skydance has not outright rejected Trump’s claims and media reports on it.
Byers’s report comes days after the New York Times published a series of interviews with former Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone, who conceded that CBS “needed more balance” and that “part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done,” referring to efforts to fix the network’s partisan slant.
Redstone has openly criticized CBS’s anti-Israel bias, in particular for a January 60 Minutes segment that relied on sources affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose executive director has openly praised Hamas.
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