A number of production staffers at the CBS Evening News has taken buyouts — and one exiting producer has made it clear that she did so due to the new leadership at the news division.
CBS News offered buyouts to non-union Evening News staffers in late January, a few weeks after Tony Dokoupil took over as anchor of the program and a day after editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told the news division at a town hall meeting that she was seeking to “make CBS News fit for purpose in the 21st century.”
“Our industry has changed more in the last decade than in the last 150 years, and the transformation isn’t over yet. Far from it,” Weiss said at the Jan. 27 meeting. “It’s almost impossible to conceive of how fast things will move from here.”
The Hollywood Reporter has asked CBS News for comment on the buyouts.
Eleven Evening News staffers have taken the buyout offer, among them producer Alicia Hastey. In a goodbye message to her colleagues (later shared by New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin on X), Hastey cited several stories she had worked on that “aimed to foreground underrepresented perspectives” along with “interviews that challenged conventional wisdom and efforts to make our journalism more responsive to a skeptical public.”
“But,” Hastey continued, “there has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism. The truth is that commitment to those people [in the stories Hastey cited] and the stories they have to tell is increasingly becoming impossible. Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
Hastey added that she remains confident that those remaining at the CBS Evening News will keep producing “thoughtful and important work, even under difficult circumstances.”