CBS News just gutted its climate team

Paramount and Bari Weiss aren't off to a great start. Here's why David Ellison should change course.

A depiction of the former CBS radio and TV studio in Hollywood. (Source: Tichnor Brothers)

Americans who rely on broadcast networks for honest journalism suffered a painful loss this week, as CBS News — fresh off its acquisition by Skydance Media and the installation of anti-woke opinion writer Bari Weiss as editor in chief — fired most of the reporters who specialize in covering climate change.

CBS owner Paramount began laying off about 1,000 employees across the broader company Wednesday, delivering a big chunk of the cost savings that Skydance CEO David Ellison promised investors. The CBS climate team’s decimation was confirmed to me by three people who requested anonymity. Not all of them work at Paramount.

Of the six-person team, four lost their jobs, effective Friday. A fifth person may yet be reassigned to non-climate stories, my sources believed. National environment correspondent David Schechter kept his job.

The layoffs are especially devastating because CBS was a climate leader among the national TV networks, becoming an early member of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now and producing vital work.

In June, for instance, CBS Evening News aired a segment on worsening heat-related health dangers for pregnant women. Just this month, the network partnered with KFF Health News to show how hospitals are facing increasingly severe flood risks.

“It’s not activism. It’s not cheerleading. It’s journalism,” said Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now.

The climate team also arranged training sessions for local CBS affiliates, hosting virtual seminars where CBS journalists across the country could learn to cover global warming. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, the climate team worked with local CBS affiliates to produce a series of web stories and TV segments exploring why congressional Republicans had voted against clean energy investments, even as polling showed strong local support for climate action.

That kind of journalism matters — in part because the people who watch broadcast news tend to be older and more likely to vote.

“CBS is one of the most important voices in the American media. If they’re not going to be covering climate change, that’s a problem,” Hertsgaard said.

A Paramount spokesperson didn’t respond to my request for comment about why the company gutted the network’s climate team, and whether CBS will still prioritize climate coverage going forward.

It’s hard not to worry, though, that the worst is yet to come.

President Trump’s appointees approved the Skydance/Paramount acquisition only after Paramount’s previous owners paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump. The president has called David Ellison’s billionaire father Larry, who helped finance the acquisition, a “friend of mine” and a “great guy” who he thinks will “run CBS really well.”

Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison delivers a speech in 2013. (Source: Oracle PR)

Then there’s Weiss, the network’s new editor in chief. David Ellison hired her for the job as part of a $150-million deal to buy the Free Press, her wildly successful Substack-based media start-up.

Weiss is neither a MAGA acolyte nor a progressive. But it’s not hard to discern her views on the climate crisis.

While reporting this story today, I conducted a brief review of the Free Press’ climate coverage and quickly found a unifying theme: that worrying too much about global warming is silly. Again and again, Weiss has published pieces insisting liberals have an unhealthy obsession with climate change, and that phasing out fossil fuels is unrealistic and harmful.

I couldn’t find a single case where the Free Press examined in any depth the serious harms caused by rising temperatures, or interviewed scientists whose views reflect the scientific consensus — that humanity is hurtling toward “climate chaos,” as a group of leading experts wrote in a new report this week.

Instead, the Free Press has played up climate skepticism.

This week, for instance, the site posted a video by its head of social media touting a recent essay by Bill Gates. The headline on the Free Press site: “Bill Gates Has Finally Admitted That Climate Doomerism Is a Mistake.”

To hear the Free Press tell it, Gates backtracked on his decades of climate work, aligning himself with a tiny handful of contrarian scientists who claim global heating is no big deal. The video implied (without saying so explicitly) that Gates admitted fossil fuels are “cheaper, faster and more reliable” than clean energy.

Not even close.

Gates’ arguments were controversial among many scientists and environmentalists (for reasons I’ll address in a future post). But he stated plainly that climate change is a “very important problem [that] needs to be solved,” and that “every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.” Gates wrote that solar, wind and electric cars are “just as cheap as, or even cheaper than, their fossil fuel counterparts.”

Another Free Press article from January, published a week after Los Angeles caught fire, misrepresented climate science with the headline: “Climate Change Did Not Cause the LA Fires.” Indeed, climate change didn’t “cause” the fires, any more than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand “caused” World War I. The Palisades fire was allegedly arson; the Eaton fire was likely sparked by electrical equipment. It still matters what kind of kindling you toss a match into.

In an abundance of fairness, the U.S. news industry as a whole has not done a great job covering the climate crisis. Among national broadcast stations, coverage peaked in 2021 and has been falling ever since, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory.

Even my former employer, the Los Angeles Times — which does some of the nation’s best climate reporting — mentioned global warming in just 13% of news stories about the wildfires during the first two months of this year.

Hurricane Melissa, sadly, offers yet another powerful reminder of why we need climate journalism.

The storm has cut a path of destruction across the Caribbean this week, killing dozens of people in Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere and causing billions of dollars in damage. As CNN’s Andrew Freedman explained after interviewing a bunch of scientists, Melissa is “a visceral example of what climate change can do to the planet’s most fearsome storms — supercharging them with heat and moisture until they become almost unrecognizable from the Atlantic hurricanes of the past.”

I’m choosing to highlight Freedman’s story in particular because CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, another entertainment conglomerate that the Ellisons hope to acquire. Would a sale lead to even less climate reporting?

I don’t know. We can only speculate.

But I’ll end on a hopeful note — or at least I’ll try. David Ellison has said he wants CBS News “to speak to that 70% of the audience that would really define themselves at center-left to center-right.” Well, if Ellison wants broad appeal, climate is a golden opportunity. As Covering Climate Now likes to point out, 74% of Americans say the federal government should do more to fight global warming.

It’s not too late for CBS to change course.

“Covering the climate crisis is not just the responsible thing to do, and not just the ethically upright thing to do. It’s also the commercially smart thing to do,” Hertsgaard said.

I don’t think Ellison subscribes to Climate-Colored Goggles. But maybe with enough email forwards, someone can get this in front of him?