The era of the liberal media is over! There’s no way around that! The job numbers are coming out, and they are utterly devastating for woke news! We’re going to look at the mass layoffs that are plaguing legacy media outlets, and we’re going to see precisely why the era of woke news is indeed coming to an end!
-The legacy media is laying people off left and right!
-This is only the beginning of the implosion
-Wait til you see what’s replacing it!
It’s being widely reported, ironically, that quote ‘sweeping job cuts’ have begun to utterly brutalize what’s left of the legacy media. The Washington Post, where democracy has gone to die in the midst of its woke darkness, has announced they are officially cutting 20 jobs in their newsroom. You’ll recall a few weeks back, a video emerged from inside a staff meeting at the Washington Post, it was an ALL employee Town Hall with the CEO trying to break the news of the papers’ at least partial demise, and it did not go well:
The Washington Post, which has lost 500k subscribers in the past year, has announced layoffs are coming to the paper. The meeting didn’t go well. pic.twitter.com/hOoeyI70jj
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) December 14, 2022
The Post is suffering from a dramatic subscriber loss; they’ve lost a half a million readers over the course of the last 2 years. They’ve gone from 3 million subs in January of 2021, to now just 2.5 million subs. It’s an absolutely stunning blow to their bottom line! And as a result, the Post has had to end their Sunday magazine, while at the same time shutting down an entire division, their gaming division; and now of course they are shedding jobs!
NBC along with its ultra-leftwing radically woke MSNBC counterpart have announced 75 layoffs across their divisions. I wonder why no one wants to watch the venomous woke rants that are a regular occurrence on MSNBC, like one of their guests referring to vaccine hesitant people as bioterrorists! Vox News, that’s Vox with a ‘v’ they’ve just announced they’re cutting nearly 10 percent of their staff all the while Buzzfeed is cutting 12 percent of their staff! But the icing on the cake of course is none other than CNN, the most DIS-trusted name in Fake News! It’s been widely reported that CNN has just experienced nothing less than an utter blood bath in job cuts.Yahoo News called it a ‘gut punch’ of layoffs! Among the victims, perhaps most dramatically, the entire staff at HLN, which is a spin-off of CNN, owned by CNN Global, the entire HLN operation has been officially nixed; not to mention of course the total termination of CNN-plus!
What we have to understand is that this is but the latest in the ongoing implosion of the legacy media.A couple of years back, The New York Times published its findings on the amount of job losses suffered by those who work in mainstream news media outlets; this was around the time of the coronavirus, but the Times was quick to point out that these trends were happening before the pandemic. According to the Times, more than 33,000 news professionals had either been furloughed, lost their jobs, or had their pay reduced around the time of the lockdown. According to the chief economist at the job posting site Indeed.com, new listings for jobs in the news media fell 35 percent around that same time period in comparison to the previous year, and again, that previous year was nothing to write home about!
The truth is that news media, traditional legacy news media, has been rapidly decline in its audience and reach for at least the last decade; FORGET print media! Print media like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, I mean their readership has utterly imploded. Around the time the Times piece was published, The Pew Research center reported a study that found that since the year 2008, US newspapers shed half of their employees, they got rid of half of their newsrooms. In fact, newspaper circulation today is at its lowest it’s been since the 1940s! Business Insider reported that the number of layoffs in the mainstream media for the year 2019 alone was more than all the job losses in the previous five years combined! So what on earth is going on here? Why are we seeing the legacy media slowly but surely dying right before our very eyes?
Two dynamics have come together to crush the legacy media; the first is a trend we talk often about here at Turley Talks, and that’s what scholars call the rise of the network society, which replaces the industrial society that the legacy media comes out of with a society linked together by networks, namely the internet. This has had the effect of radically democratizing information through immediate digital sharing, so today information is able to bypass the legacy media outlets in a manner comparable to the way email and texting bypass the post office! So that’s the first trend, a societal trend, that’s ushering in a very different world than the one that engendered the legacy media.
But there’s a second trend that’s absolutely crushing the legacy media, and that’s their embracing of what’s called ‘advocacy journalism’, and the irony here is that advocacy journalism rejects the objective reporting that the legacy media continues to try to defend itself with! That’s the key contradiction that I think is exacerbating this legacy media demise! Advocacy journalism BEGINS with the partisan narrative or the frame that they want to advance, you know, in this case, woke leftism, and then the so-called reporters select and fit the supposed facts into that woke frame! So advocacy journalism almost inevitably commits the fallacy known as confirmation bias, where information and data are in effect weaponized to support one’s more basic foundational partisan sentiments! But they’re doing this all the while they CLAIM that they’re objective and non-partisan, and so they come across as what we call a performative contradiction, and thus the TRUST that is foundational to an operative business model in media, the trust that they are reliable mediators of information, implodes! And with these mass layoffs, we are witnessing that implosion right before our very eyes!
