The fall of the CBS News climate team
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United Nations Climate Change Conference
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As Hurricane Melissa raced toward Jamaica on Monday, CBS News senior coordinating producer Tracy Wholf sent an email to the newsroom, detailing the historic storm’s scientific connection to climate change.
In the message obtained by HEATED, Wholf explained how an overly-hot Atlantic Ocean supercharged Melissa, fueling its rapid 70-mph intensification in a single day, boosting winds by about 10 mph, and turning what might have been a category 4 storm into a category 5. Wholf suggested a simple sentence CBS News reporters could use in storm-related stories to make the connection.
Wholf usually sent emails like this in the wake of deadly extreme weather events, two CBS News staffers told HEATED. But it was the first such email Wholf had sent under the company’s new pro-Trump billionaire chief executive David Ellison, and its new anti-“woke” editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
It was also the last. Two days later, as Hurricane Melissa smashed into the Caribbean, Wholf was laid off, along with the majority of the five person team supporting CBS News’s climate coverage.
Today, the only person remaining at CBS News to cover climate change is national environmental correspondent David Schechter, who no longer has a dedicated producer. In addition to Wholf’s layoff, two producers supporting the climate team were let go, and another dedicated climate producer was reassigned.
The cuts were part of a larger layoff on Wednesday that affected nearly 100 other CBS News staffers, including the network’s race and culture team, and around 1,000 staffers across newly-merged parent company Paramount Skydance.
It’s unclear why Wholf’s position was eliminated, when the decision was made, or who made it. Layoffs at CBS News were reportedly planned before Weiss’s appointment as editor-in-chief in early October, but Weiss had been meeting with Ellison prior to her appointment due to Paramount’s acquisition of her news outlet, The Free Press. In a memo announcing the cuts on Wednesday, Ellison said he was “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.” Representatives of CBS and Paramount Skydance did not return HEATED’s request for comment.
Whatever the reason, the result
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