Paramount Skydance, the media conglomerate that owns CBS News, plans to lay off roughly a thousand employees on Wednesday as it seeks to cut costs following its controversial merger, according to reports.
The venerable entertainment company fused with movie and TV producer Skydance in August after paying President Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit its own lawyers had called "meritless", in what some critics described as "bribery" to secure regulatory approval.
The merger brought CBS News, Paramount Pictures, MTV, and the Paramount+ steaming network under the control of David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump tech billionaire (and Earth's second-richest person) Larry Ellison.
Now, inside sources have told Bloomberg and Deadline that the first round of long-expected layoffs, affecting around a thousand employees mostly in the U.S., will begin this week — with another thousand to follow in the near future.
That would be about 11 percent of its reported 18,600 full- and part-time employees, not including its 3,500 project-based staff.
"We do not want to be a company that has layoffs every quarter. So, it’s going to be painful," said Paramount president Jeff Shell after the merger.
It comes after CBS Evening News anchor John Dickerson announced he would be leaving the network at the end of the year, having earlier taken an on-air swipe at the Trump lawsuit settlement.
CBS News staffers told The Independent that it felt like the network's new management "wanted him to fail", citing the recent installation of Free Press founder and anti-woke firebrand Bari Weiss as editor in chief.
Since Ellison’s takeover of Paramount in August, CBS News has been in the midst of a restructuring that has sparked criticism that the 42-year-old executive is shifting the network’s coverage to the right to appeal to the president.
Besides hiring the “radically centrist” contrarian Weiss and purchasing her “heterodox” digital outlet The Free Press, Ellison has installed a former Trump appointee as an ombudsman to root out “complaints of bias” at CBS News and revamped Face the Nation’s editing rules following complaints from the White House.
The Independent has asked Paramount Skydance for comment.
