Conde Nast, Paramount Cut Jobs—and Political Dissent

Ari Paul

Two major media brands announced layoffs and consolidation. Paramount, now under the control of the Ellison family, laid off 1,000 employees across its companies, including CBS News (Deadline, 10/27/25; Independent, 10/30/25). Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue’s website would be phased out and incorporated into its parent publication Vogue (New York Times, 11/3/25), leading to staff terminations.

The firings at both these media outlets have the character of political purges. They will have a tremendously negative impact on the already sorry state of political news in the United States.

'Painful to think about'

Stories like this one from Teen Vogue (10/10/25) that discuss politics particularly as it impacts young people are very rare in corporate media.

Teen Vogue had made a name for itself beyond pop culture and fashion, becoming a rabble-rousing political site, recently covering the defense of immigrants under the Trump administration (3/6/25) and interviewing Zohran Mamdani (10/31/25). Teen Vogue’s now-former politics editor, Lex McMenamin, was recently on NPR’s It’s Been a Minute (11/3/25) to talk about the renewed American interest in socialist politics.

A joint statement by Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York condemned the consolidation. The Hollywood Reporter (11/3/25) said:

“Management plans to lay off six of our members, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans, including Teen Vogue’s politics editor—continuing the trend of layoffs at Condé disproportionately impacting marginalized employees,” the organizations stated. They added, “Teen Vogue now has no writers or editors explicitly covering politics.”

The groups continued, “As of today, only one woman of color remains on the editorial staff at Teen Vogue.”

Aiyana Ishmael (Bluesky, 11/3/25) said:

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members.

At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be one of two Black women left, and what that meant for representation. Now there are no Black women at Teen Vogue, and that is incredibly painful to think about.

Pulling coverage to the right

Former CBS producer Trey Sherman (Daily Beast, 10/30/25): “It wasn’t until I went downstairs, thinking me and all of my colleagues had been laid off, that I found out it was only people of color.”

Paramount owns CBS, and when Paramount was taken over by the Ellison family, FAIR (7/24/25, 9/9/25,  9/19/25) voiced its worry that the new owners, and its new CBS News editorial content czar Bari Weiss, would pull news coverage to the right, especially on the issue of Israel/Palestine.

Now we can see how the news outlet is being remolded. The Daily Beast (10/30/25) reported:

A Black producer who worked for a CBS News show that was canceled on Wednesday said that every producer on his team who was laid off is a person of color, whereas the white producers are being reassigned within the company. Trey Sherman had worked since February as a full-time associate producer at the streaming show CBS Evening News Plus. He was fired Wednesday after the network’s new anti-woke editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, announced CBS was canceling several shows, axing its race and culture unit, and laying off dozens of staff members.

One journalist being let go was Israel/Palestine correspondent Debora Patta, whose work was described by colleagues (London Independent, 10/30/25) as "largely sticking to the facts on the ground while steering clear of any emotional investment." The Independent reported that Patta's name was added to the list of layoffs

after another male foreign correspondent apparently complained to Weiss—who is stridently pro-Israel and describes herself as a “Zionist fanatic”—that he wasn’t getting enough airtime, nor was deployed to cover the Gaza war because of his support for Israel.

Beyond CBS, Paramount is said to be compiling a blacklist of Hollywood personnel with unacceptable political views. Variety (11/4/25) reported that "Paramount maintains a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed to be 'overtly antisemitic.'” Those with “xenophobic” and “homophobic” attitudes were also said to make the list, but Variety noted pointedly that Paramount was

the first major studio to denounce a celebrity-driven open letter signed by A-listers like Emma Stone and Javier Bardem that called for a boycott of Israeli film institutions implicated in "genocide and apartheid" against Palestinians.

There is no evidence that the federal government pushed for any of these changes, although it’s clear the politicized FCC has influence over what happens at CBS. But this is a terrible step forward in media capitulation to the regime by reducing critical coverage of the government, carrying out the regime’s white nationalist, anti-DEI agenda and, in the case of Teen Vogue, neutralizing a feisty dissident outlet that had an audience beyond the usual politics-reading crowd.

This news is bad enough for the hardworking people who are now jobless. But it’s also another blow to democracy.