CBS News has discreetly eliminated its renowned Climate Unit amid broader staff cuts, as its new owners seek to reduce expenses and remove roles deemed no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.

The unit—responsible for environmentalist coverage of climate change and training local stations on climate reporting—was disbanded last week while Hurricane Melissa traversed the Caribbean. Just prior, senior coordinating producer Tracy Wholf emailed the CBS newsroom attributing the storm’s intensity to climate change, per the blog Heated, which focuses on alerting readers to an irreversible climate catastrophe.

According to Heated, Wholf typically sent such emails following deadly extreme weather events. This instance stood out, however, as it was her first since Skydance acquired Paramount and appointed Bari Weiss—a former New York Times journalist known for opposing woke ideology—as CBS News editor-in-chief.

Two other producers assigned to the climate unit were let go along with Ms. Wholf. Another producer was reassigned, leaving CBS’s national environmental correspondent, David Schechter, as the only journalist on or off the air dedicated to covering climate issues. Whether Mr. Schechter will continue on his beat is unclear.

Paramount announced its layoffs with the stated goal of addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization” and “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.

Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, expressed dismay over CBS disbanding its climate unit, telling Climate Colored Goggles, CBS is a key player in American media. Their lack of climate change coverage is troubling.

What is notable is that, according to Heated, CBS‘s climate unit was considered the premier climate change reporting team on cable news (but that isn’t saying much). In light of an upcoming merger, this could have been a way to also curry favor with the Trump administration in order to increase the likelihood of a Paramount-Skydance merger approval by the appropriate federal regulatory agencies.

Regardless of the reasons, this was a positive move to ensure at least some semblance of balance on network TV news while lessening the transmission of climate change propaganda.

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