CBS News is cutting about six percent of its workforce and shutting down CBS News Radio entirely. Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and President Tom Cibrowski delivered the news in a memo released Friday.
"Today we are reducing the size of our workforce, and employees who are affected will be notified by the end of the day."
According to the New York Post, the six percent reduction amounts to roughly 60 layoffs, with total workforce reductions possibly reaching 15 percent when combined with earlier buyouts. Those buyouts have already hit staff connected to CBS Evening News.
In a separate memo, CBS leadership confirmed that all positions within the CBS News Radio team are being eliminated. Every single one.
According to Breitbart, CBS News Radio has operated since 1927. The network rose to prominence in 1938, when Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer launched the "World News Roundup," connecting reporters worldwide to deliver updates during the early days of World War II. That broadcast remains the longest-running newscast in the country.
The shutdown memo acknowledged as much, noting that CBS News Radio "served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927." Leadership praised the division's legacy, from Murrow's wartime reports in London to daily White House updates.
"We understand how difficult this news is for our staff and their colleagues, who have worked side by side with us to cover some of the most significant stories of our time."
Warm words. Cold results. Nearly a century of broadcast history, and the farewell fits in a corporate memo.
The Weiss and Cibrowski memo leaned on familiar restructuring rhetoric. The news business is "changing radically." New audiences are "emerging in new places." Parts of the newsroom "must get smaller to make room for the things we must build to remain competitive."
Translation: the old model broke, and someone has to pay for it. In this case, roughly 60 people pay for it immediately, with more to follow.
There is nothing unusual about a media company restructuring. Networks trim staff. Divisions get folded. The business evolves. What makes this particular moment worth watching is who is doing the cutting and what it signals about where CBS News is headed.
Bari Weiss occupies a peculiar position in American media. She left the New York Times in 2020 over what she described as an illiberal culture within the newsroom, built The Free Press into one of the more interesting independent outlets in the country, and then landed as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her name on this memo carries weight that a typical network executive would not.
For years, legacy media hemorrhaged audience trust. Ratings cratered. Credibility collapsed. The institutions that once commanded American attention became punchlines, and the people running them seemed genuinely confused about why. CBS was no exception. The network that built its reputation on Murrow's integrity spent recent years accumulating the same credibility problems as every other legacy outlet.
Now Weiss and Cibrowski are restructuring. The memo frames it as a forward-looking investment, pointing to "ambitious plans to grow" and reach audiences "in new places." Whether those plans amount to genuine reinvention or standard corporate optimism remains to be seen. But the willingness to kill a division that has existed since 1927 suggests this is not a cosmetic trim.
The layoffs at CBS are part of a broader reckoning that has swept through corporate media for years. Outlets that once operated as gatekeepers now compete with podcasters, independent journalists, and creators who built audiences by doing what legacy newsrooms refused to do: speak plainly, challenge orthodoxies, and trust their audiences to handle complexity.
The memo states that "some parts of our newsroom must get smaller to make room for the things we must build to remain competitive." That sentence contains an admission that most legacy outlets still struggle to make. The old structure does not work. The audience left. You cannot maintain a 20th-century operation on 21st-century revenue.
But the deeper problem was never headcount. It was editorial. Americans stopped watching network news because network news stopped serving them. Coverage became predictable. Framing became uniform. Entire categories of stories went untouched because they cut against preferred narratives. Trust evaporated not because the internet offered alternatives, but because the alternatives were more honest.
Restructuring the business side without confronting the editorial failures that drove the audience away is like repainting a house with a cracked foundation. It looks better for a season.
Behind every layoff number is a person who showed up on a Friday morning and got told their position no longer exists. About 60 of them at CBS News, plus the entire radio division. These are reporters, producers, engineers, and support staff. Some built careers spanning decades at the network.
The CBS News Radio shutdown memo acknowledged the human cost, calling the decision "difficult" and recognizing the work its staff had done. Those are the right words. Whether the institution earned the right to say them after letting its product decay for years is a different question.
CBS News Radio survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, and the rise of cable news. It did not survive the era of institutional self-destruction that corporate media inflicted on itself.
The longest-running newscast in the country just got canceled. The foundation CBS built everything on since 1927 has been demolished by the people who inherited it.