CBS News Guts Climate Team as New Conservative Management Takes Charge

CBS News has fired most of its climate crisis production staff as part of the company’s dozens of news staff layoffs last week.

The decision to lay off the climate desk comes after Paramount, parent company for CBS News, merged with Skydance. Following the merger, David Ellison, a pro-Trump billionaire, became chief executive of the new Paramount Skydance company, and conservative writer Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Layoffs were expected as a result of the merger. Around 100 news staffers have been let go, The Guardian reported, with one staffer calling it a “bloodbath” that was set to affect “a number of departments.”

CBS News senior coordinating producer Tracy Wholf, the former head of the climate desk, was among those who were fired. Two other producers on her team were also laid off, with a third producer reassigned to a different department. Only environmental correspondent David Schecter remains in his position, without an assigned producer overseeing his work.

Wholf’s departure came shortly after she sent an email within the news department suggesting that the network’s reports on Hurricane Melissa include context about the climate crisis. Wholf had suggested including a simple sentence in reports to link the storm with the crisis: “The above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures, made worse by climate change, helped Melissa rapidly intensify into a category 5 storm.”

“Tracy was the one pushing everyone to do more climate stories. She brought everyone together,” one CBS News staffer told Heated’s Emily Atkin. “Without Tracy, there is no climate unit.”

Atkin recognized in her report that the climate team layoffs may not have been prompted by Wholf’s email — but noted that it’s clear the new management of CBS News is not prioritizing reporting on the climate crisis.

“Whatever the reason, the result is clear: By dismissing Wholf and her team, Ellison has effectively told CBS News it’s no longer responsible for keeping the public informed about climate change,” Atkin wrote.

Wholf’s assertions about Hurricane Melissa being impacted by the climate crisis are backed up by statistical analyses.

The storm reached peak sustained winds of around 185 miles per hour, with wind gusts reaching well over 200 miles per hour, making Hurricane Melissa one of the two strongest Atlantic storms on record to make landfall. At least 60 people have died in Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic due to the storm.

A rapid attribution study from the Imperial College of London found that the wind speeds in the storm were 7 percent higher than they likely would have been without the effects of climate change, and that damage from the storm was 12 percent higher.

Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, told Wired. “We know that the warming ocean temperatures [are] being driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases.”

In addition to downsizing its climate team, CBS News dismantled its race and culture unit, prompting one employee who was laid off to accuse the company of discrimination.

“I just got laid off from my job at CBS, and every producer on my team who got laid off is a person of color,” said Trey Sherman, who was an associate producer within the race and culture unit until the layoff notices were issued. “Every person who gets to stay and will be relocated within the company is a white person.”