Massive Media Layoffs Expose Collapse in Public Trust

Some excerpts:

"Good evening. It's Thursday, January 25.

"Tonight: it is not an exaggeration to say that major parts of the liberal corporate media are now in complete freefall. Just in the past few weeks, some of the most recognizable media brands have suffered massive layoffs or even been brought to the brink of extinction, including the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Business Insider. BuzzFeed, months ago, completely abolished its news division. Just this week, the L.A. Times laid off 25% of its already decimated newsroom in just one day, just months after it laid off 13% of its workforce. It is hard to put into words just how extreme and complete is the implosion of Brooklyn-based liberal digital media over the last several years.

"Mr. Bezos hasn't fared much better at The Washington Post. Like many news organizations, The Post has struggled to hold on to the momentum that it had gained in the wake of the 2020 election. Sagging subscriptions and advertising revenue led to losses of about $100 million last year. At the end of the year, the company eliminated 240 of its jobs.

"And we've recently shown you polls that the only people who have faith and trust in almost every major media corporation other than Fox News and Newsmax are Democrats. So, you have an entire industry catering to one political party that represents about 30% to 35% of the public, that is constantly having to feed them and validate their views, because the minute they alienate them, the dwindling audience that they have will dwindle even further. They're captive to their audience in a way that really can't be overstated. I once talked to a host at MSNBC, who told me that they don't get episode-by-episode ratings, they get segment-by-segment ratings. And they told me this is 2014 or 2015, that whenever they would put on a guest that was critical of the Democratic Party, you could watch the audience just click away and go somewhere else. They didn't want to hear it. And that conditions those people and trains them that if they want to keep their job, they have to refrain from alienating their audience. That means never criticizing the Democratic Party. So, they become more and more homogenized, more and more banal, more and more predictable, more and more willing to lie, and therefore less and less trustworthy and less and less interesting to huge numbers of people who don't identify as Democrats.