In the swirling chaos of 2025, the state of Black media in the United States feels like it’s being squeezed from all sides. What once seemed like progress — the flourishing of Black voices in journalism, culture, and entertainment is increasingly under threat. From mass layoffs to institutional restructurings, today’s landscape reveals how fragile Black representation in media remains. And against the backdrop of Trump’s return to power, the pressures on Black media and Black journalists have only grown sharper.
One of the most searing recent incidents occurred at Teen Vogue, a title once praised for amplifying young, socially conscious voices. In early November 2025, Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue would be “absorbed” into Vogue.com, and entire swaths of staff were laid off including the politics and news teams.
In the wake of that announcement, former (and now ex-staffer) Aiyana Ishmael took to Bluesky to post: “there are no Black women at Teen Vogue and that is incredibly painful to think about.” Her message cut past corporate spin to expose another truth: that structural support for Black women in media is often the first casualty of cost-cutting measures. It’s a heartbreaking reality.
While individual layoffs reveal painful moments, the “Blackout Report” published in October 2025 by Onyx Impact helps situate these patterns within a broader systemic project. The report attempts to catalog how policies under Trump’s return to office have disproportionately harmed Black communities, whether through regression in civil rights, rollbacks of protections, or the hollowing out of accountability systems. The report itself is part of a countercurrent, a pushback against erasure. We see you, Onyx Impact.
Beyond magazine media, the network news world has seen its own brutal reckoning. In October 2025, CBS News parent company (Paramount, in merger with Skydance) began sweeping layoffs that severely impacted its Race & Culture Unit, and dismantled verticals dedicated to race, gender, and culture. At the same time, Bari Weiss, newly installed as CBS News’ editor-in-chief, has been accused of shifting personnel in ways that systematically dislodge Black leaders in coverage of race stretching the narrative that the network is shedding its Black institutional memory. The tea is SCALDING.
A former CBS producer, Trey Sherman, went public via TikTok, alleging that the layoffs were in fact race-based. He claimed that on his team, “every producer laid off … was a person of color,” while white staffers were reassigned instead of terminated.
Meanwhile, eight on-air correspondents (all women, many of them women of color) were let go under Weiss’ tenure. Critics argue these decisions read as more than cost control: they signal a realignment of corporate ideology at the expense of inclusive reporting and institutional memory. But we really know what’s up.
Across the aisle, NBC News also laid off about 150 people in its news division earlier in the same month. Those cuts disproportionately affected editorial teams focused on NBC BLK, NBC Latino, NBC Asian America, and NBC OUT. Entire units built to surface issues of race, gender, culture supposedly core to inclusive news coverage are being collapsed at the same time as Black voices are being laid off or reassigned. The shape of what remains is narrower, blander, and less rooted in the communities it once served.
We can’t treat these events at Teen Vogue, CBS, NBC as isolated episodes of bad leadership or poor corporate strategy. Rather, they reflect a broader structural assault on Black media under conditions of political rollback, information warfare, and media consolidation.
When Black-led and culturally centric editorial spaces are squeezed, the margins of what Black creators and journalists can do become unbearably thin. The layoffs at Teen Vogue are especially emblematic: Black women are not just losing jobs, they are losing institutional homes and creative space. The wounds are not only material but symbolic. As Aiyana Ishmael put it: “there are no Black women at Teen Vogue.” That erasure hurts future talent pipelines and legitimacy. It’s a direct attack on our voices.
When media corporations fold political verticals, lay off Black staff, or reassign coverage meant to amplify marginalized voices, they’re not just making business decisions, they’re actually reshaping whose stories matter. There is power in Black storytelling. Power to shift culture, challenge systems, and build connection. That belief is more urgent now than ever. As we watch the erasure unfold across legacy newsrooms, it’s on us readers, creators, and culture lovers alike to keep pushing back and keep creating to keep telling our stories on our own terms.
Jamie Broadnax is the creator of the online publication and multimedia space for Black women called BlkCosmo Blerds. Jamie has appeared on MSNBC’s The Melissa Harris-Perry Show and The Grio’s Top 100. Her Twitter personality has been recognized by Shonda Rhimes as one of her favorites to follow. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and executive producer of the BlkCosmo Blerds Podcast.
