CBS News just made one of the most telling hires in broadcast television this year — and it came straight from the competition’s bench.
The network has named Joshua Hoyos as its new editorial director, plucking the veteran news executive from ABC News, where he spent roughly a decade shaping coverage and editorial strategy. The move, first reported by Business Insider, is more than a routine personnel shuffle. It’s a strategic play by a network that has spent the past two years trying to stabilize its identity after a turbulent stretch of leadership upheaval and corporate realignment under Paramount Global’s new ownership structure.
Hoyos isn’t a household name. Most viewers wouldn’t recognize him. But inside the insular world of network news operations, editorial directors wield enormous influence over what stories get prioritized, how they’re framed, and ultimately what millions of Americans see when they tune in each evening. He’ll report to Wendy McMahon, the co-president of CBS News and Stations, who has been steadily reshaping the division since taking the reins.
The timing matters. A lot.
A Network in Transition Finds Its Editorial Quarterback
CBS News has been through more institutional turbulence in the past three years than at any point since the Dan Rather era. The merger of Paramount Global with Skydance Media, finalized in early 2025, created a new corporate parent that has been aggressively evaluating costs and editorial direction across all of Paramount’s media properties. CBS News, long the crown jewel of the CBS broadcast network, hasn’t been immune to that scrutiny.
The departure of Neeraj Khemlani, who previously co-ran CBS News alongside McMahon, left a power vacuum that took months to fully resolve. McMahon consolidated authority and has since been assembling a leadership team that reflects her vision for the division — one that emphasizes digital growth alongside traditional broadcast strength. Hoyos fits that mold.
At ABC News, he was deeply involved in editorial planning for both linear broadcasts and digital platforms. He helped coordinate coverage across “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight with David Muir,” and ABC’s streaming efforts on Hulu and ABC News Live. That cross-platform experience is precisely what CBS needs as it tries to grow its CBS News Streaming Network, which launched in early 2022 and has struggled to gain the kind of traction that ABC and NBC’s streaming news products have achieved.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth for CBS: it has been losing the ratings war. “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell” ceded significant ground to Muir’s broadcast before O’Donnell’s departure. Her replacement, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois as co-anchors, has stabilized things somewhat but hasn’t dramatically altered the competitive picture. The morning show “CBS Mornings” has remained a distant third behind “Today” and “GMA.” Hiring someone who knows how the top-rated competitor operates isn’t just smart. It’s necessary.
Hoyos brings institutional knowledge of what has made ABC News the dominant force in evening news ratings for several years running. Whether that translates to CBS remains to be seen, but the signal is clear: McMahon is willing to recruit aggressively from rivals to close the gap.
The broader context of this hire extends well beyond any single network’s internal politics. Broadcast news is facing an existential reckoning with audience fragmentation, declining linear viewership among younger demographics, and the relentless gravitational pull of social media platforms and independent creators. The three legacy networks — CBS, ABC, and NBC — still command enormous audiences by any digital standard, with evening newscasts each drawing between five and eight million viewers on a given night. But those numbers have been trending downward for years, and the median age of viewers continues to climb.
Editorial leadership in this environment requires a fundamentally different skill set than it did even a decade ago. It’s no longer enough to produce a tight 22-minute evening broadcast. Networks need someone who can think about how a story lives across a morning show, an evening newscast, a streaming channel, a podcast, a social media clip, and a push notification — all simultaneously, all with different editorial considerations. That’s the job Hoyos is walking into.
The ABC Brain Drain Question
For ABC News, losing Hoyos is a notable blow, even if not a catastrophic one. The network under president Almin Karamehmedovic has deep bench strength and remains the ratings leader. But talent departures to competitors always sting, particularly when they involve people who understand the editorial machinery from the inside.
ABC has dealt with its own share of upheaval. The high-profile settlement with Donald Trump over George Stephanopoulos’s on-air comments — reported widely in late 2024 and early 2025 — created internal tensions and external scrutiny that tested the network’s editorial leadership. Hoyos navigated that period from within. Now he’ll be on the other side, potentially using lessons learned to strengthen a direct competitor.
This kind of cross-pollination between networks isn’t new. It’s practically a tradition. Jeff Zucker went from NBC to CNN. David Rhodes went from Fox News to CBS News. Kim Godwin moved from CBS to ABC before eventually departing. The revolving door spins constantly. But each move carries strategic implications, and this one is no exception.
What makes Hoyos’s move particularly interesting is its timing relative to the 2026 midterm election cycle. Networks are already ramping up their political coverage operations, and editorial directors play a central role in determining how elections are covered — from resource allocation to tone to the balance between policy substance and political theater. CBS’s political coverage has drawn both praise and criticism in recent cycles. The network’s moderation of the vice-presidential debate in 2024 drew sharp reactions from partisans on both sides, which in the modern media environment is probably the closest thing to a compliment a news organization can receive.
Hoyos will be expected to help sharpen CBS’s editorial voice heading into what promises to be another bruising political season. The midterms will serve as his first major test, a very public proving ground where the results — both in coverage quality and ratings — will be immediately measurable.
There’s also the question of how this hire fits into CBS’s broader content strategy under Skydance and Paramount Global’s new leadership. David Ellison, who now controls Paramount through Skydance, has signaled interest in maintaining strong news operations as part of the company’s portfolio. But maintaining and investing are different things. CBS News executives are watching closely to see whether corporate rhetoric about the importance of news translates into actual budget commitments — for investigative units, for foreign bureaus, for the kind of resource-intensive journalism that distinguishes network news from cheaper alternatives.
McMahon’s ability to recruit someone like Hoyos suggests she still has the organizational clout and budget flexibility to make competitive hires. That’s a positive sign for the division. But one hire doesn’t resolve structural challenges. CBS still needs to figure out its streaming strategy, its digital-first content approach, and how to attract younger viewers who have never developed the habit of watching a nightly newscast.
So where does this leave things?
CBS News has a new editorial director with deep experience at the top-rated competitor. It has a co-anchor team still finding its footing. It has a corporate parent still defining its priorities. And it has an election bearing down fast.
For Joshua Hoyos, the opportunity is enormous. He’s stepping into a role where success means helping to reverse years of competitive decline at one of the most storied names in American journalism — the house that Murrow built, that Cronkite defined, that Rather and Pelley and O’Donnell carried forward through vastly different eras. The weight of that legacy is real. So is the difficulty of the task ahead.
But CBS didn’t hire him for sentiment. They hired him because he knows what winning looks like. He saw it up close at ABC. Now he has to build it somewhere new.
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