CBS News Guts Its ‘Climate Unit,’ Leaving Climate Activists Distraught

CBS News has quietly gutted its celebrated “Climate Unit” as part of its staff reductions as its new owners aim to slash costs and eliminate positions that are “no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.”The Climate Unit – which did environmentalist reporting on climate change and also did training for local stations about how to report on climate change – was dismantled last week as Hurricane Melissa made its way through the Caribbean. A senior coordinating producer, Tracy Wholf, had just sent an email to the CBS newsroom linking the hurricane’s strength to climate change, according to Heated, a blog dedicated to warning about an “irreversible climate catastrophe.Heated reports that Ms. Wholf “usually sent emails like this in the wake of deadly extreme weather events.” This time was different, however, as it marked the first time she had sent such an email since Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount and the installation of the anti-woke journalist, Bari Weiss, as CBS News’s editor-in-chief. Two other producers assigned to the climate unit were let go along with Ms. Wholf. Another producer was reassigned, leaving CBS’s national environmental correspondent, David Schechter, as the only journalist on or off the air dedicated to covering climate issues. Whether Mr. Schechter will continue on his beat is unclear.Paramount announced its layoffs with the stated goal of “addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization” and “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.”In order to win the government’s approval of its acquisition of Paramount, Skydance committed in writing to the FCC that CBS News would provide fair coverage that reflected a wide range of views. President Trump is skeptical about theories of climate change, and in September told the United Nations that, “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” His cabinet ministers and agency heads with influence over environmental policy have been actively dismantling environmental regulations and pushing to expand energy production and heavy manufacturing.CBS’s decision to slash the climate unit comes months after left-leaning Covering Climate Now published a puff piece celebrating CBS News’s climate unit, as it noted the team had “produced more than 60 stories on the climate crisis” since President Trump’s 2024 election. Ms. Wholf told the outlet that her team would intentionally find ways to weave the urgency of climate change into all manner of stories“We haven’t pitched them as climate stories,” Ms. Wholf told Covering Climate Now. “We’ve pitched them as politics stories, as science stories, as consumer stories. Then we make the climate connection within those stories. If tariffs are the big story of the day, then we’re going to find that [climate] angle inside tariffs.”According to a study by the far-left group Media Matters, ABC News and NBC News cut the amount of time spent on climate change coverage between 2023 and 2024.In 2023, NBC News spent 109 minutes discussing climate issues, and the next year it spent 92 minutes. ABC News devoted 74 minutes to climate issues in 2023 and just 36 minutes to the same issue in 2024. The Tiffany Network was the outlier, airing 76 minutes of climate change coverage in 2023 and 118 minutes in 2024. The climate team also organized planning for CBS’s local affiliates to instruct journalists on how to cover climate stories.The executive director of Covering Climate Now, Mark Hertsgaard, bemoaned the end of CBS’s climate unit, telling Climate Colored Goggles, “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.”Climate Colored Goggles noted the climate unit also “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.”The CEO of Skydance, David Ellison, has made it clear he wants to clean up the network and address longstanding complaints of a left-wing, anti-Israel bias at CBS News and turn it into a network that Democrats and Republicans feel they can watch. His decision to acquire the Free Press and make its founder, Ms. Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief raised concerns among left-wing commentators due to her staunch pro-Israel views. Climate-focused journalists have noted that Ms. Weiss’s views on the climate are not as clear as her views on Israel. However, they have noted that the Free Press has published multiple articles denouncing left-wing, “apocalyptic” messaging about the climate.The climate change unit was not the only left-wing team to be gutted during the layoffs. The Race and Culture unit, which was created during the “racial reckoning” in 2020 to review the “tone, content, and intention” of stories related to race, was also slashed. The team was different from race-focused units at other news organizations in that it had a role in screening and passing judgment on content within CBS News. The Race and Culture unit faced criticism last year after it was reported that the unit played a key role in the network’s decision to reprimand one of its morning show hosts, Tony Dokoupil, for his line of questioning during an interview with the bestselling anti-Israel author, Ta-Nehisi Coates.Mr. Dokoupil, who is Jewish, confronted Mr. Coates about some of the virulently anti-Israel rhetoric in his bestselling book “The Message” and said some of it sounded like it would be “in the backpack of an extremist.” The interview sparked internal turmoil and complaints that made their way to the Race and Culture unit. The team did not find an issue with Mr. Dokoupil’s questions, but instead with his tone, even though observers such as the Washington Post called the exchange “calm” and “heartfelt.”CBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

CBS News Guts Its ‘Climate Unit,’ Leaving Climate Activists Distraught

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