The fall of the CBS News climate team

Another mainstream media organization falls to censorship. Upgrade to paid

Source: CBS News

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.

A screenshot of the email Tracy Wholf sent to CBS News staffers on Monday, two days before she was laid off.

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 is clear: By dismissing Wholf and her team, Ellison has effectively told CBS News it’s no longer responsible for keeping the public informed about climate change.

“Tracy was the one pushing everyone to do more climate stories. She brought everyone together,” one CBS News staffer said. “Without Tracy, there is no climate unit.”

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Before the cuts, CBS was leading the way

In general, corporate cable news doesn’t have a great reputation for covering climate change. But Wholf and Schechter were trying to change that.

Their work was highlighted in a June 2025 piece by Covering Climate Now. The article noted that while climate coverage was decreasing on most television news stations, Wholf and Schechter had together produced more than 60 climate stories since Trump’s election across television, streaming, and digital platforms.

To get these stories assigned, Wholf and Schecter regularly framed pitches not as climate stories, but as politics, science, or consumer stories—and then weaved in the climate connection. This allowed the team to keep reporting even under corporate and political pressures, like Paramount’s settlement talks with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview.

“If you look at the 60-plus stories we’ve done,” Schechter told Covering Climate Now, “it’d be pretty hard to say that someone is trying to keep us quiet.”

Source: Media Matters

CBS News has also increasingly been a leader in informing readers about the main cause of climate change: fossil fuel pollution. (The connection between fossil fuels and climate change is sorely missing in most mainstream climate coverage, as we’ve previously reported).

According to Media Matters, CBS mentioned fossil fuels in 18 climate segments in 2024. Meanwhile, ABC only mentioned fossil fuels in 8 segments, and NBC only mentioned fossil fuels in 2 segments.Upgrade to paid

No Wholf, no workflow

Wholf’s dismissal, in particular, represents the biggest blow to CBS’s climate coverage. Because she wasn’t just producing climate stories, according to people who worked with her. She was the connective tissue that helped the entire network understand how climate change fit into the news cycle.

Without her, staffers told HEATED, there will be no more weekly, standing climate segment on stream. Her voice will not regularly be on CBS Radio giving 30-second blurbs about the latest climate and air quality studies. There will be no one encouraging local CBS affiliates to pursue local climate stories—and no one offering support when local reporters want to pursue them. There will be no more newsroom-wide notes about the climate connection to extreme weather. And there will be no one to cover COP30, the upcoming international climate summit in Brazil.

The disappearance of this coverage represents a major setback for public understanding of climate change, said Mark Hertsgaard, the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now.

“Tracy Wholf is an extremely dedicated journalist, extremely gifted and hardworking,” he said. “I think it’s just a shame if she’s not still in that position.”

And as corporate consolidation of mainstream media continues, with Trump-supporting billionaires sweeping up major media organizations throughout the country, Hertsgaard worries that the trend of diminishing climate coverage will continue. That benefits no one, except those who profit from pollution.

“Our founders believed that democracy could not survive unless the public was fully informed and could make informed choices as citizens,” he said. “There is no bigger issue facing the world or America right now than climate change. It’s a five alarm fire, and we should be treating it like that, not retreating from the story.”