Following the first round of layoffs back on September 29, CBS News’s parent company Paramount Skydance instituted its second set of rumored cuts Friday that, along with four notable correspondents being shown the door, CBS News Radio will be killed off entirely after a historic 99-year-old run that helped usher in news on a national scale and move the country to radio (and, later, television).
All told, around six percent of the workforce will be laid off (between 60 to 70 people), down from the originally feared 15 percent.
Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski told staff in a memo that “[i]t’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it” and with “[n]ew audiences…burgeoning in new places…we are pressing forward with ambitious plans to grow and invest so that we can be there for them.”
That said, they wrote, “some parts of our newsroom must get smaller to make room for the things we must build to remain competitive.”
The two wrote a second company memo that specifically addressed the decision about CBS News Radio, explaining the “CBS News Radio team and approximately 700 affiliated stations that we will end the service on May 22, 2026.” They added the decision “not…easy” but “necessary.”
They explained “[a] shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service” even though the platform “delivered original reporting to the nation—from Edward R. Murrow’s World War II reports in London to today’s daily White House updates” and “the longest-running newscast in the country,” “World News Roundup.”
More broadly, Weiss said on the company’s 9:00 a.m. Eastern editorial call that CBS would be “saying goodbye to a number of our colleagues and friends today and that is hard” and “especially hard when we are living through such an intense news cycle where people are working their hearts out.”
Along with a number of cuts for CBSNews.com in the Washington bureau, there were a number of TV correspondents let go, some with over a decade of time at the Tiffany network.
Over at the Los Angeles Times, longtime media reporter Steve Battaglio compiled some of the CBS correspondents, which included general correspondent Dave Malkoff, environmental correspondent David Schechter, longtime general correspondent Elaine Quijano, and Texas-based correspondent Omar Villafranca.
The New York Post’s great Alexandra Steigard had three more names in correspondent Andres Gutierrez (who had just reported on gas prices and the Kouri Richins verdict) and two whose work was primarily seen on the weekends or CBS News 24/7 in Nidia Cavazos and Karen Hua.
Schechter joined CBS in 2022 and, even though his NewsBusters tag is short, he has a few humdingers, including one in which he teamed up with a climatologist in February to speculate what George Washington might think about climate change.
Further proof that the Media Hall Monitors’ breathless incantations of CBS News being “MAGA-aligned” is absolute nonsense: a Sunday Morning item linking George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware with climate change pic.twitter.com/DpOYkNEcIl
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 15, 2026
Along with gushy profiles of Jane Fonda and the Biden regime’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, Schechter actually stated just over a year ago (March 14, 2025) that humans have “less than 10 years” to save the planet.
CBS environmental correspondent David Schechter rips @EPALeeZeldin: “I think the biggest risk is that we have a small window to deal with climate change, really. I mean, you know, it is getting smaller and smaller, less than 10 years to level out and reduce our emissions, and we… pic.twitter.com/nA7fDoVTRL
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 14, 2025
Quijano was the longest tenured person the TV side let go as she arrived at CBS in 2010. Along with frequently serving as a fill-in host, she had anchored CBS Weekend News in years past and even moderated the 2016 vice presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence.
Ahead of the debate, Kaine was assisted in debate prep by longtime D.C. lawyer Bob Barnett, who was married to Rita Braver, a CBS colleague of Quijano. The New York Times also hilariously admitted Quijano tried to help Kaine along in dealing with Pence.
Quijano more recently had stories we flagged at NewsBusters as fearing increased deportations could mean fewer illegal immigrants to serve as home health care nurses.
Most infamously, she was behind the disgusting, pro-eugenics CBS documentary in 2017 that glorified Iceland having largely eliminated down syndrome from its population. How, you might ask? Abortions, of course.
Finally, Villafranca had been with CBS since 2014 and, in recent years, unsurprisingly found himself covering stories at the U.S.-Mexico border (such as sob stories here, here, and here to name a few).
