Earlier this week, a thirtysomething producer at CBS Evening News elected to take the buyout offer that Bari Weiss and network president Tom Cibrowski had extended to the show’s staff. The producer, Alicia Hastey, was one of about a dozen of the show’s 40 employees to accept the offer, which is a precursor to the long-anticipated cuts that, I’m told, will hit the news division in a matter of weeks.

Most exited quietly; Alicia did not. Bari’s “sweeping new vision” and emphasis on “heterodox journalism” were making it “impossible” to report important stories, Alicia wrote in a note to colleagues. “Stories may instead be evaluated not on their journalistic merit,” she continued, “but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations—a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

In more sober times, this performative farewell might have merely circulated among sympathetic colleagues. But amid the media industry’s double-barreled existential panic over its contracting influence and CBS’s Trump-inflected mission drift, it received a little more fanfare. New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin, who first surfaced the letter, called it “a bombshell.” (Ben, my man…) MS NOW played up the culture of “fear and uncertainty” that Alicia had cited. More broadly, the buyouts at Evening News were treated as a sign of crisis. Variety called it “an exodus.”

But what’s happening at CBS News, while unfortunate, is both unremarkable and predictable. Bari arrived with her editorial convictions, sure, but she also inherited a bloated, cash-bleeding, chronically third-place news division with a legacy cost structure (and plenty of self-righteous employees). She saw an Evening News staffed by 40 people and immediately concluded it probably needed only half that. This wasn’t an exodus; she quite literally asked these people to leave and incentivized them to do so. And those who would protest her mandate to “break from traditional broadcast norms” in their Notes app and leak it to the Times are probably the first ones she wanted gone.

The impending layoffs are likely to inspire even more catastrophizing. Bari and her team have not yet determined the full extent of the cuts, nor when they will be implemented. But the expectation is that they’ll arrive in a matter of weeks, trim shows and departments across the division, and impact between 150 to 200 positions, or roughly 15 to 20 percent of the employee base.

Given the antipathies toward Bari among network vets and newsroom warriors, one need only look at Will Lewis’s grossly mismanaged bloodbath at The Washington Post to anticipate how this shitshow is likely to play out. And yet such a juxtaposition would be facile. Will arrived at this month’s bloodletting after two years of exacerbating the Post’s problems and failing to set it on a proper course, and he made absolutely no effort to finesse the contractions. Bari is implementing these cuts in her launch phase and addressing bloat that probably should have been addressed by previous administrations. If there’s any lesson Bari can learn from the Post’s prolonged drama, it’s that she would do well to announce her cuts sooner rather than later.

The convulsions at CBS News and the Post hint at a broader misreading of the current crisis in legacy media. So much of the discourse around these institutions fixates on matters of editorial realignment: the “shifting set of ideological expectations” that lead to the platforming of Erika Kirk while temporarily shelving the work of Sharyn Alfonsi, or Jeff Bezos’s last-minute decision to scuttle a Kamala Harris endorsement. Even the champions of this ideological shift misdiagnose the problem when they blame journalists’ bias for the industry’s woes. In a recent column, former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerry Baker wrote that of all the threats facing journalism today, “the role journalists themselves have played in the collapse of trust among news consumers is most important.” (Gerry, my man…)

In reality, newsrooms aren’t struggling because of editorial bias. Indeed, the most successful legacy news organizations, as well as many of the most successful independent creators, have thrived in large part by embracing some form of bias or perspective. The “progressive” New York Times that Bari once castigated has masterfully identified—and monetized—its product-market fit with a highly educated liberal readership. If CBS News or the Post were anywhere near as “MAGA-coded” as their critics insist, they might be enjoying the record-high ratings and ad revenues now accruing to Fox News. But you also can’t change the ideological valence of a publication overnight without alienating its legacy audience. If anything, Bari might take the lesson from Will that the market for political centrism—whether you’re calling it “heterodox” or “nonpartisan”—is smaller than their business class patrons think.

The true source of legacy media’s problems is far simpler to diagnose but harder to remedy: They were built for a different century and a different distribution model, and they have so far failed to navigate the transition to a smaller, multiplatform future. And maybe a craft as vaunted as journalism deserves better stewards than the lot of Will Lewis and Chris Licht and Kim Godwin types it’s been given, but even a savvier generation of leaders would have recognized that the only path to a sustainable future runs through strategic consolidation—especially in the age of A.I. Across media, there are going to be a lot more cuts ahead. That’s a rule of an industry in decline, not an exception.

One of the criticisms leveled against Lewis was that he never seemed capable of articulating a plan. In his defense, there wasn’t one, besides launching extraordinary P&L rescue missions at a company losing around $100 million a year. At least you have to hand it to Bari: She isn’t sugarcoating it either. The plan is cuts, followed by more cuts (and maybe more still)—alongside, yes, a nudge to the center.