Since finally closing on the politically tainted and bruising $8 billion merger last week, new Paramount CEO David Ellison has been making big moves left and right.
With the ratings of CBS Mornings sliding over the past few months and the network’s daily morning show mired in third place, could the network’s new ownership be looking at making another sweeping change? And would that possibly entail getting rid of Gayle King, the program’s most recognizable face?
Well, with Ellison and his senior leadership looking to slice off $2 billion in costs from the new company, and the 70-year-old King making at least $10 million annually on a contract that ends in May, it seems more and more like a possibility, if not a probability.
“There’s always speculation about her inflated salary and entourage,” a network insider said of King. “She’s undoubtedly expensive and not necessarily on the right side of the new political agenda.”
The Independent has reached out to representatives for Paramount, Gayle King and CBS News for comment.
Based on data from Nielsen Research, the CBS morning show is averaging 1.813 million daily total viewers year to date, through August 12. This marks a 10 percent drop compared to the same period in 2024, and places them well behind NBC’s TODAY (2.405 million) and ABC’s Good Morning America (2.498 million).
The year-over-year plummet is even worse for the show in the key advertising demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54, where CBS Mornings viewership has sunk to 315,000 daily viewers for the year. This is down 19 percent compared to last year and far behind GMA (426,000) and TODAY (543,000).
The drop also accounts for the one-day bump that the show received from King’s much-hyped trip – alongside Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez – aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft for a brief trip above Earth’s atmosphere. That April broadcast brought in 3.9 million viewers, rocketing past ABC and NBC while marking the show’s best performance in four years.
The viewership for the CBS show, which also features co-hosts Nate Burleson and Tony Dokoupil alongside King, has sunk to such a level that it is nearly getting passed by a cable news morning program. With Fox News seeing a ratings surge this year following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Fox & Friends is up 24 percent in total viewership (1.602 million) and 17 percent in the key demographic (17 percent) year to date.
“There is serious concern about the ratings slide at [CBS] Mornings,” one network source told The Independent. “In particular, they’ve seen major drops in women.”
Based on an AI-generated study reviewed by The Independent, the network shared with staffers last month that CBS Mornings was perceived as having more “distressing” and “controversial” content than its broadcast rivals, while also having the least “happy” and “celebratory” programming.
“There has been a marked shift in the last few weeks to fluffier stories,” the network source added, noting that Thursday morning included a lengthy segment about Taylor Swift’s new album announcement on boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast.
Another staffer said that the network “wants to do more light stuff” and “less dark/hard news” during the morning. Notably, last fall, CBS Mornings came under fire – and Dokoupil was reprimanded by then-news chief Wendy McMahon – following an interview in which the anchor compared celebrated author Ta-Nehisi Coates to an “extremist” over his position on Gaza. Meanwhile, former Paramount chair Shari Redstone – a well-known supporter of pro-Israeli causes – backed Dokoupil’s pointed questioning of Coates.
While CBS has generally been an also-ran in the broadcast morning show wars, the Paramount-Skydance merger and much of the fallout surrounding it have sparked increasing public speculation that King could soon find herself on the chopping block and the program finding itself overhauled.
Days before Skydance officially took over Paramount, the New York Post breathlessly reported that King’s future at the network was “murky” because the ratings for her “woke” morning show had tanked, all while the soon-to-be new owners vowed to the Trump administration to “scrap left-wing bias.”
“The ‘CBS Mornings’ co-host, one of the fading Tiffany Network’s few remaining stars, is part of a culture that has ‘dug in’ against attempts by higher-ups to move away from polarizing coverage, according to sources with knowledge of the situation,” the Post noted, adding that the show’s executive producer Shawna Thomas “set a programming ‘agenda’ that has alienated traditional morning show viewers.”
That followed a previous New York Post story from May that noted that King’s 13-year career at the network “could finally be coming to an end” after she signed a one-year extension to her contract.
One network insider, however, told The Independent that the Post article seemed to “come out of nowhere since Gayle is the biggest star.”
It didn’t take long for the media-obsessed Trump to seize on the story, sharing it on his Truth Social site while taking a personal shot at King. “Gayle King’s career is over. She should have stayed with her belief in TRUMP. She never had the courage to do so. No talent, no ratings, no strength!!!” Trump blared.
Of course, the Post story and Trump’s amplification of it don’t come in a bubble. Following Trump’s election, Paramount’s former chief shareholder Redstone – who desperately needed the merger to be approved so she could clear roughly $2 billion – pushed for the company to settle Trump’s “meritless” lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
The negotiations to settle the suit, which led to accusations of “bribery” due to the pending merger needing the administration’s approval, resulted in several senior news leaders resigning in protest. Following the $16 million payoff to Trump, the old Paramount then announced that it was canceling Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, prompting critics – some within the network itself – to allege the move was politically motivated.
Meanwhile, in the days before the administration finally approved the merger, Skydance promised the Federal Communications Commission that it would install an ombudsman to review “complaints of bias” at CBS News and eliminate all diversity policies at the company.
Furthermore, Trump has claimed that on top of the pre-merger settlement from Paramount, he’d reached a secret side deal with Ellison – whose father is Oracle founder and close Trump ally Larry Ellison – for $20 million of pro-Trump PSAs to be aired on CBS once the Skydance deal was finalized. (Ellison has repeatedly sidestepped questions about Trump’s claim.)
Since last week’s merger completion, though, Ellison and his senior executives have gone out of their way to say they don’t want to “politicize anything” surrounding the company or place their thumbs on the scales of CBS News. “He said all the right things and more,” one CBS News staffer told The Independent after Ellison visited the newsroom right after the merger closed.
Instead, it would seem their north star is the same as most major media companies these days – maximize profits while reducing costs. This has seen Ellison make wildly ambitious moves early on, even as Paramount’s new executive leadership has warned there will be “painful” layoffs coming down the pike soon.
Days after Skydance closed on the deal, Paramount announced that it had secured the rights to air UFC events with a massive seven-year, $7.7 billion agreement. This came on the heels of Paramount agreeing to pay the creators of South Park $1.5 billion to continue airing the raunchy hit show’s content for five more years.
With Ellison also hyping that the studio will be committed to big-budget movies in the near future, such as another Star Trek film and Top Gun 3, it seems increasingly likely that Paramount’s new tech-friendly leadership is going to look towards its linear networks to bear the brunt of the cuts. Especially since Paramount President Jeff Shell recently explained that, unlike other media conglomerates, they won’t be spinning off their cable assets.
“We have less of our economics of the company on cable because they decline so much,” Shell said this week at a media event, suggesting that Paramount will be utilizing brands such as BET, MTV and Comedy Central to be “building blocks” of the company’s streaming strategy.
That all harks back to CBS Mornings and how the recent ratings drop could potentially lead to significant changes that could include saying goodbye to King.
“We do not want to be a company that has layoffs every quarter,” Shell said this week. “So, it’s going to be painful. It’s always hard, but we don’t want to be a company that every quarter is laying people off… So, it is important for us to get done what we’re doing in one big thing and then be done with it.”
Network sources also noted that most people on the program, as well as CBS Evening News, are now waiting for Tom Cibrowski – the ABC News veteran who was brought in as president and executive editor of CBS News this past spring – to make changes to both shows now that the Paramount merger has been finalized.
While the morning show has always been profitable for the network, those ad revenues have been decreasing this year due to the falling ratings – though sources tell The Independent that CBS Mornings is still turning a profit. Still, King’s reported $10+ million annual salary would be an easy ledger item to cross off if the network decided not to renew her.
In fact, amid the shrinking advertising dollars for broadcast and cable television as streaming has boomed, networks have increasingly parted ways with high-profile veteran broadcasters rather than continue to pay their exorbitant salaries. TODAY’s Hoda Kotb, who was making $20 million a year, decided to step down last year after NBC asked her to take a pay cut.
“NBC executives loved Hoda and knew her value to the brand, but also made clear to her agents that such stratospheric contracts were no longer justifiable given the industry’s inexorable decline,” due in part to the steep ratings decline affecting ‘Today’ and competitors like ‘Good Morning America,’” Puck reported at the time.
On top of that, Paramount is also crossing off not just Colbert’s $15 million salary after The Late Show signs off for good in May, but also the program’s roughly 200 employees and high production costs. Though the program remained the top-rated broadcast late-night show, the overall drop in broadcast viewers and dwindling ad revenues for late-night television resulted in the show losing $40 million a year.
“Late-night has a huge problem right now,” Shell said this week. “The problem is that 80 percent of the viewership and growing is on YouTube.”
In the end, though, sources at the network stressed that while King may also be viewed by many within the organization as being increasingly “out of touch with the average viewer” due to her close friendship with Oprah Winfrey and luxurious lifestyle, there still isn’t any definitive answer on her fate at this time.
“It’s just speculation at this point,” a CBS staffer noted.
