CBS News — the once-prestigious “Tiffany Network” built by giants like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace — is the latest media institution to succumb to the bizarre spectacle of complete wokeness.

This was proven by a leaked tape in which CBS’ fake news executives idiotically reprimanded an actual real journalist for doing his job.

“CBS Mornings” host Tony Dokoupil got in trouble for pressuring the author of a one-sided, anti-Israel polemic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, about his distorted, historically inaccurate views on the Middle East conflict.

It is another example of how it is now forbidden in modern journalism to challenge someone like Coates who questions Israel’s right to defend itself on the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 massacre.

What’s less public is how all of this craziness affects CBS’ future as a going concern, and especially its impending sale to Skydance, an independent studio owned by film producer David Ellison, known for “Top Gun: Maverick.”

David’s father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is providing much of the money behind the deal and from what I understand he isn’t too happy about his latest acquisition.

If you don’t know Larry, here’s a primer: He’s one of the richest men in the world and one of the most pro-Israel executives in American business – he’s friends with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Let’s just say the people at Skydance and the Ellisons read the newspapers (particularly The Post, which I know intimately).

They are powerless to do anything about what is happening at CBS right now; The $28 billion deal to buy the network’s parent company, Paramount, from the controlling Redstone family won’t close until sometime this spring.

But they won’t be powerless for much longer. One person who knows all the players under CBS’ new ownership told me, “They’re thinking about blowing the place up.”

Nobody knows exactly what “blowing up the place” means. Will this lead to the defenestration of CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon and news agency head Adrienne Roark, both of whom led the internal drubbing of Dokoupil?

Beyond any doubt?

Could it be the creation of a new ethics department – ​​one without DEI madness? Many people believe that one of the reasons they chose to throw one of them under the bus is because Coates is black, which in the world of DEI means he is above reproach.

As I reported last week, the Anti-Defamation League and its boss, Jonathan Greenblatt, complained to McMahon that Dokoupil, who is Jewish, was simply doing his job and being held to an absurd double standard.

The flacks at Skydance declined to comment because they don’t officially own the network yet (CBS press representatives didn’t respond to emails seeking comment), but none of this goes unnoticed at Skydance as they see the value of the investment in doing so see diminished The woke mind virus and the controversy it has sparked are keeping the whole mess in the news, and not in a good way.

Also speaking is the nominal owner of CBS, Shari Redstone, daughter of the late media mogul Sumner Redstone and architect of the media conglomerate. Shari said McMahon & Co. “made a mistake here” in their criticism of Dokoupil.

Then Paramount co-CEO George Cheeks caused even more outrage when he defended the network’s top brass in a memo that appeared to have been written by a leftist in his DEI department.

The good news is that the Ellisons and their partners at RedBird Capital, a media-focused investment firm, reportedly agree that the CBS wake show needs to end, people who know their thinking tell me.

They are aware of another looming controversy that threatens their investment: whether the prestigious CBS news magazine “60 Minutes” positively edited its interview with Kamala Harris.

Yes, the security guards at CBS are playing with fire — and their jobs — for many reasons, including simple math.

I read Paramount’s balance sheet and it doesn’t show how much the news division alone makes (or loses).

The sector is also expensive. It costs money to run a large news organization. Awake programming costs even more in a time of cord-cutting.

As I write in my new book “Go Woke Go Broke; “The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America”: Companies that continue to go there find themselves increasingly oppressed by consumers.

That’s why my Wall Street sources who know Ellison and RedBird say the news division could be sold at some point.

They are more concerned with monetizing sports programs, such as CBS’ significantly less political football coverage.

In the meantime, however, David Ellison and his father Larry want CBS News to return to its roots, people close to them tell me.

They don’t believe there is a market for wake programming because the market is crowded with providers like MSNBC. “If CBS wants to survive, it needs to return to down-the-middle programming,” said one person with knowledge of Skydance’s thinking.

And they tell me that if it takes blowing the place up, then so be it.