Ideas have consequences.
Don’t take it from me; take it from the establishment media outlets who championed Joe Biden’s candidacy and economic policies as well as Democrats’ COVID lockdowns and are now watching the chickens come home to roost.
Regular readers of The Western Journal need no examples to remind them of the fact that the legacy media — with the exceptions of The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the New York Post — have been on Team Biden (or, more accurately, Team Anyone-But-Trump) since roughly Nov. 9, 2016, the day after former first lady Hillary Clinton lost to then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
But those examples abound. Two months after The Washington Post ran a highly negative story about Trump’s alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election audits, it was forced to issue what it called a “correction” but which was in all but name a retraction of its original claims.
And remember the illegal immigrants housed in “cages” built during President Barack Obama’s administration? I’m pretty sure my mom still thinks Trump built those cages — because that’s what Big Media told her.
And don’t even get me started on Hunter Biden’s laptop or the credible testimony from a former business partner of his, Tony Bobulinski, that payments had to be made by a Chinese firm to “The Big Guy,” who might or might not have been then-Vice President Joe Biden. If we leave it up to the mainstream outlets, we’ll never know for sure.
Had the legacy media played fair with the American people and reported the truth, we might be midway through Trump’s second term about now. And while that doesn’t necessarily mean that all would be rainbows and puppies, it’s likely that much of the economy-killing health, environmental and tax policies would never have been passed, much less signed into law.
How would that have worked out for those outlets? That’s hard to say with certainty, of course. But what we can say with certainty is that, under Joe Biden, they are not faring well.
The lackluster economy and historical inflation rates are crushing advertising revenue for these media giants; whether the U.S. is officially in recession or not hardly matters. As a result, costs have to be cut.
And by “costs,” I mean “heads.”
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The Washington Post announced last week that it would shut down its Sunday magazine at the end of this year, eliminating the jobs of all 10 employees who worked weekly to produce it, but that was a minor bump in the road compared to steps other outlets are taking.
Gannett, the mass media holding company responsible for the nation’s largest total daily newspaper circulation, has been through multiple rounds of headcount-related cost reductions.
In August, the company cut 400 positions and froze hiring on 400 others, according to Poynter. Two months later, the company “imposed a week’s unpaid mandatory leave, suspended contributions to 401(k) plans and asked employees to consider a voluntary separation offer.”
Most recently, the company’s news division announced a 6 percent headcount reduction target in November. Poynter estimated that that would affect about 200 more employees.
New CNN CEO Chris Licht warned of coming layoffs in October. Some big names at the network, like Chris Cillizza, have been affected, as have hundreds of other contributors and staffers, according to reports from Vanity Fair.
Even NPR instituted a hiring freeze. For now, no one is being laid off, but 137 jobs aren’t going to be filled in the near future — leaving more work to spread around to the people who do remain employed there.
Nor is it only these companies’ news divisions being affected, of course, as ad revenue is down across the board in Biden’s struggling economy. CBS, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal all either already have cut hundreds of jobs or are expected to in the immediate future.
So, because of the policies of their man and his party’s policies, left-leaning establishment media outlets throughout the country are now watching their chickens come home.
At least all these media company layoffs should mean there will be plenty of room in their uncrowded offices for roosting.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
