CBS News staffer claims job cuts disproportionally hit Israel critics

Recent job cuts at CBS News disproportionately hit those whose coverage was critical of Israel, a staffer told Variety in an article published Tuesday.

Variety also reported that CBS’s owner, Paramount, maintains a list of people it doesn’t work with due to their being “overtly antisemitic,” as well as “xenophobic” and “homophobic.”

The report on the job cuts, citing an unnamed staffer, came in a cover story in the entertainment magazine about David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS. The roughly 1,000 cuts were part of sweeping changes introduced at the US network after Ellison hired Jewish journalist Bari Weiss as CBS News’s new editor-in-chief. The company also acquired her media startup, The Free Press, for $150 million.

Weiss is vocally pro-Israel, and at least one laid-off reporter, Debora Patta, is considering suing after losing her job, the New York Post reported last week. Patta had covered the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, and drew controversy in August when US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee accused her of selectively editing an interview to mischaracterize his remarks.

According to Variety, a Paramount staffer said the layoffs “were not motivated by [pro-US President Donald Trump] MAGA politics or gender.”

Paramount has been accused of settling a lawsuit with Trump — over a CBS interview with Trump’s 2024 opponent Kamala Harris, and the edit of her answer to a question about the war in Gaza — in order to appease the US president.

Critics said Paramount settled that case in order to appease Trump, whose administration had the power to challenge its merger with tech giant Skydance.

The New York Post reported last week that Weiss decided on Patta’s firing hours before the list of layoffs was finalized, reportedly axing the correspondent in place of Chris Livesay, a Rome-based reporter who, the Post reported, had asked Weiss to assign him the Israel beat.

Variety also reported that Weiss’s pro-Israel advocacy has led to her receiving death threats. The article said that she and her wife, Nellie Bowles, who is also a journalist, have a five-person security detail that costs the network $10,000 to $15,000 per day.

David Ellison is the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, himself an outspoken Israel supporter. Under the younger Ellison’s leadership, Paramount objected to a pledge by thousands of Hollywood figures to boycott Israeli film institutions they claim “are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”