Not surprisingly, as revenues of the major media continue to drop, layoffs of journalists increase. As The New American recently reported, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other media outlets are suffering massive defections from their ranks of readers and viewers. It noted that CNN has lost nearly 60 percent of its key demographics, those aged 25 to 54 that advertisers are looking for.
And layoffs are creating a group of liberal journalists trying to find someone to blame. One of their targets is Freddie DeBoer, a liberal writer who has been able to prosper through his often-offensive posts on politics.
DeBoer had enough and he responded on Monday:
[Journalists] who were raised to see success as their birthright … have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due….
A small handful of people [like me] make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive.
There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble.
There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance….
Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers….
They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again.
It’s all about simple economics and the law of supply and demand. When demand declines, supply dries up. In this case, the now-superfluous supply of liberal journalists entering a market niche that is in serious decline:
They’re so angry [at me] because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security….
There are just too many affluent kids fresh out of college looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so [are] driving down the wages of everyone else.
The devastation is vast. In the three months from December through February All in With Chris Hayes (MSNBC) has suffered a 29-percent decline in his ratings. Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC) is down 27 percent while CNN Tonight With Don Lemon (CNN) is off 28 percent.
Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN) is down 33 percent while The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC) is off nearly 18 percent.
Fox News is suffering as well: The Ingraham Angle is off 13 percent while Hannity is down 17 percent. Even Tucker Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Tonight is off more than two percent.
Those fresh-faced enthusiastic journalists seeking work in a declining industry are themselves to blame, wrote DeBoer:
What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you: college-educated, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product….
You flooded the market.
Everyone in [the] entire industry is selling the exact same thing: tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves.… It’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else.
Then DeBoer unloads on the real reason for the vast oversupply that few are demanding: the takeover of the media by the far left:
In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media.
Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition.
The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color.
The takeover is having its impact:
How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes?
Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?
The students bought the lie they were taught in college and university:
They did not challenge the indoctrination that they were given in their departments of sociology, English, and political science.
They believed every word.
They believed that they could take their ideas into the marketplace and find people to pay them a good living….
The market does not work that way….
They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t.
Freddie DeBoer has done the country a great service. If his words had come from a conservative, they would have been ignored. Coming from one of their own, his words carry much weight.
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