Bari Weiss and the Great TV News Pay Cut
Tony Dokoupil’s paycheck, Gayle King’s looming haircut and the shrinking economics of today’s on-air talent
I’ve written for The Ankler about the Netflix and Paramount spin doctors waging a shadow war for Warner Bros. Discovery and I spoke to Wall Street insiders about their 2026 predictions for Hollywood. I also write The Media Mix newsletter.
TV news executives are bracing for yet another round of cost-cutting at Paramount Skydance, where an effort to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and the execution of a planned merger between its own CBS News and Warners’ CNN is yet to materialize.
Paramount Skydance told Wall Street in November 2025 that the targeted synergy number would be as much as $3 billion. With the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in its crosshairs, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison updated the forecast to $6 billion. But while the battle for WBD plays out — with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos touting his company’s $72 billion bid as “good for the entertainment industry” while an activist investor is urging WBD to take a closer look at Paramount’s sweetened bid — economies must be found.
“They’re now really looking at the cuts. The cuts will be more aggressive. They thought they were going to have an easier time getting WBD and merging CBS News into CNN,” one highly placed source tells me. Now, “they’re probably going to go a little deeper than they initially planned.”
Paramount Skydance has already swung the axe, announcing it would cut 2,000 staff across the company late last year, and CBS News is in the process of offering buyouts at Evening News, the New York Post reported. One who took the buyout, producer Alicia Hastey, made her exit with a fiery note criticizing the network’s management and editorial direction, which was posted on X by the New York Times’ Ben Mullin.
Another big headache: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning a major crackdown on direct-to-consumer healthcare ads, forcing marketers to more fully list medications’ side effects. The pharma industry poured upwards of $5 billion into TV ads through November, according to eMarketer — one of the biggest spenders in TV. A pullback could hurt network news broadcasts.
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told staff that if the news division continues on the same path, “we’re toast,” though in the same address, she described CBS News as “the best-capitalized media start-up in the world.” She has since tapped 19 new contributors to TV and digital platforms. Among them is the controversial health advocate Peter Attia, who had off-color email exchanges with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Weiss is under pressure to cut Attia, and critics have questioned the wisdom of replacing journalists with figures more akin to influencers.
CBS News declined comment.
Even as a slew of major stories from ICE killings to the burgeoning revelations of the Epstein files are set to juice news ratings, the downward trends are clear, and it’s not just a CBS problem. The broadcast networks took 21.4 percent share of total watch time versus streamers with 47.5 percent, according to Nielsen numbers for December. Both CBS and Versant, the newly spun-off home of cable news channels MS Now and CNBC, are under pressure to align costs with the new realities of TV viewing, even as they try to grow digital offshoots.
“It’s no surprise — we’re in the middle of a huge change and we’re going to see cuts in linear to build out digital. That’s evolution,” says Alison Pepper, a former SVP talent strategy at CBS News, now building a talent advisory for news industry executives at The Briefing Room.
Along with Pepper, I spoke to Raymond James analyst Brent Penter and several news-biz insiders about how these two companies — one at the mercy of parentco Paramount Skydance’s M&A fortunes, the other finding its way after a strategic spinoff from Comcast’s NBCUniversal — are navigating the new normal. Plus, I dig into what it all means for the top-priced and top-rated anchor talent — an elite and dwindling club of about 20 who move in a rarefied contract ecosystem but are increasingly seeing their pay packages shrink (with one notable exception).
 | A guest post by
|