Black and brown former employees from CBS, NBC and Teen Vogue talk about the effects of being let go
T
rey Sherman was traveling to work on the New York subway when he received an email from David Reiter, a CBS News executive, about an imminent meeting on 29 October. Sherman, an associate producer of CBS Evening News Plus at the time, suspected that he would be laid off. CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, had closed a merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance in August, and planned to slash more than 2,000 jobs as part of corporate restructuring.
Sherman, who is Black, and Reiter, who is white, had an amicable conversation, according to Sherman. Reiter told Sherman that he was being laid off because his show was being eliminated, Sherman said, and that Reiter was unable to assign the team to other positions. Sherman accepted the news and the two men wished each other good luck.
But when Sherman left the conference room and entered the newsroom, he said he learned that his white colleagues had been told a very different story. A white co-worker told Sherman that she found it “messed up” that the people of color on the team had been laid off. Of the nine producers who staffed CBS Evening News Plus, five white people were reassigned to other positions, while the four people of color on the team were let go, according to Sherman and another former staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Later that day, Sherman documented his experience in a viral TikTok video. CBS did not respond to the Guardian’s multiple requests for comment.
