A former CBS News producer is alleging that recent layoffs at the network disproportionately affected employees of color, following a broad round of cuts by its parent company, Paramount.
“I just got laid off from my job at CBS, and every producer on my team who got laid off is a person of color,” former CBS staffer Trey Sherman said in a TikTok video posted Wednesday. “Every person who gets to stay and will be relocated within the company is a White person.”
Sherman, who is Black, worked as an associate producer for CBS Evening News+ since February, according to his LinkedIn page. He also served as an associate producer for the CBS Race & Culture Unit — both of which were eliminated in the recent layoffs.
Sherman claimed that the executive who informed him of his termination told him he had tried to relocate employees but ultimately couldn’t. “It wasn’t until I went downstairs thinking that me and all of my colleagues had been laid off that I found out it was only the people of color,” he said. “So, I went one by one to my White colleagues — ‘Are you getting laid off?’ ‘No.’ … and that’s when I realized what was happening.”
When Sherman confronted the executive about what he believed to be an unfair process, he said he was told the remaining staff were those the executive had “worked with before.” Sherman criticized that reasoning as racially biased. “If the outcome of that decision is racist, the action was racist,” he said.
Neither Sherman, CBS News, nor Paramount responded to requests for comment.
Paramount, which is now led by CEO David Ellison following the Skydance Media merger, recently cut approximately 1,000 jobs across the company, according to sources familiar with the matter. The layoffs heavily impacted CBS’s weekend and livestream programming. Reports suggest that many of the personnel decisions were made prior to Ellison’s appointment of Bari Weiss as CBS News’ new editor-in-chief, part of Paramount’s $150 million acquisition of her outlet The Free Press.
“CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson also announced this week that he will leave the network at the end of the year.
