CBS News denies ‘inaccurate’ Puck report it’s losing $50M a year

CBS News is denying a bombshell report which said the network was hemorrhaging around $50 million annually — a claim the network aggressively shot down as “inaccurate.”

The controversy began on Wednesday when Puck correspondent Dylan Byers dropped a stunning item claiming two sources familiar with CBS News’ finances revealed the purported losses.

According to Byers, CBS News’ ailing balance sheet would not sit well with its new boss, Skydance Media CEO David Ellison, whose company acquired corporate parent Paramount Global for $8 billion.

Ellison “certainly isn’t going to tolerate those losses,” Byers wrote in Puck.

“And despite his paeans to Walter Cronkite and the importance of a free press, he isn’t likely to invest in growing that business, either.”

But sources at CBS News told The Post that the Puck report was completely off base.

“A published report that CBS News is losing ‘around $50 million a year’ is inaccurate,” a spokesperson for the division told The Post.

“In fact, the division is currently profitable.”

Industry insiders immediately seized on Byers’ scoop as a sign that the new management team helming CBS News would embark on a cost-cutting spree, according to the Status newsletter.

On Friday, The Post exclusively reported that Skydance is preparing to enact a massive “bloodbath” of layoffs across Paramount in November

A $50 million annual loss would virtually guarantee brutal budget slashing at CBS News, which issued a denial less than 24 hours after Puck published its story.

Unnamed network employees told Status that they suspect the bogus $50 million figure was deliberately planed with Byers in order to justify impending cuts.

Byers refused to retreat from his bombshell report. After posting CBS’s denial on social media, he doubled down with cryptic warnings about accounting “nuances that deserve further exploration.”

“60 Minutes” remains profitable, Byers noted, but “the rest is… complicated.” He promised to address the controversy in his next newsletter.

The Post has sought comment from Puck and Byers.

Byers reported that Ellison’s plan “is to right-size CBS News, bring down talent salaries, require smaller teams to work on smaller budgets, maybe leverage evergreen ’60 Minutes’ packages on Paramount+, and hopefully lure Bari Weiss into the mix to shake things up a bit.”

It’s been reported that Weiss, a former opinion editor for the New York Times, has been shopping her news site, The Free Press, for up to $250 million.

According to Byers, Weiss, who has reportedly held discussions with Ellison about selling The Free Press, may be on her way to the Tiffany Network to take up a senior post at the news division.

“As of this week, the new Paramount front office remains bullish on the Bari deal,” according to the Puck correspondent.

The timing of Byers’ item couldn’t have been worse for the embattled network, which is already reeling from corporate parent Paramount’s decision to axe “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in light of reports the late-night program was bleeding $40 million yearly.

Both the struggling show and news division fall under the purview of Paramount executive George Cheeks, potentially putting him at the helm of nearly $90 million in combined annual losses if both figures proved accurate.

Jeff Shell, the newly installed president of Paramount, has been telling colleagues that cost-cutting ranks among his top priorities as Ellison’s lieutenant.

Last week, Shell, The former NBC Universal executive, said he expects $2 billion in cuts in one fell swoop.

“We do not want to be a company that has layoffs every quarter,” Shell said last Wednesday in Los Angeles, citing constant waves of cuts under Paramount’s previous leadership.