As CNN prepares to apply lipstick to its porcine snout ahead of AT&T's planned $85 billion acquisition of parent company Time Warner, dozens of employees are about to receive their walking papers, reports Vanity Fair.

The layoffs, thought to include as many as 50 jobs globally, are said to affect employees in premium business segments, including CNN Money, video, product, tech and social publishing - effectively reversing course on several ill-fated digital ventures launched by president Jeff Zucker designed to compete with Vice and BuzzFeed.

CNN is also said to be scaling back its "virtual reality productions," as well as efforts to integrate the Snapchat platform - for which the network recently canceled a live daily webcast after only four months. CNN is also planning to gut its business-oriented MoneyStream app as well, as reported earlier this month by BuzzFeed.

As the network employs thousands of people around the world and brings in $1 billion annually, the looming cuts amount to "pruning" of sorts - however they do point to the latest in a string of poor decisions by the "Fake News Network" which has made it abundantly clear they are vehement enemies of the sitting US President.

“Not every new project has paid off so we will stop some activities in order to reallocate those resources and enable future experimentation,” CNN representative Matt Dornie told Vanity Fair.

A team that works on the digital extensions of documentary-style TV shows, such as Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and Lisa Ling’s This is Life, as well as the Brooke Baldwin series American Woman, is also being reorganized. -Vanity Fair

And between a botched "bombshell" report on Donald Trump Jr., and an undercover exposé in which their own employees admit that the Trump-Russia story is a nothingburger for ratings, oh - and the bizarre cheerleading for North Korea during the 2018 winter Olympics - one wonders why AT&T still wants the network whose credibility is at all time lows.

So with CNN scaling back its digital operations in advance of the AT&T deal - assuming the Department of Justice doesn't succeed in scuttling the deal, perhaps now they can redirect their efforts towards not reporting fake news?