Excellent news out of the MSM world, both at the small and the large scale.

First with the larger news.

Newspaper Giant Gannett Faces More Layoffs Amid Disastrous Quarter and Recession Fears

Gannett recorded a dismal second quarter financially, the company reported Thursday – important revenues sources down, costs up and a loss of $54 million on revenues of $749 million. Strong cost reduction moves are on the way.

The writer actually worked for Gannett, which focuses on local news across the USA. He was on contract with them years ago and put together a podcast with one of their reporters, but it got canned as a cost-saving measure. It’s entirely typical of many MSM businesses that they just have not been able to leave their past behind. He notes print circulation and advertising falling below expectations, as did digital advertising, with rising costs even before the recent inflation hit. There have been multiple cost cutting efforts but all they resulted in is skeleton reporting teams and the costs not making a difference anyway.

They’re already dead: they just don’t know it.

Then there’s the excellent, if smaller-scale, news out of CNN as they fired the execrable Brian Stelter (seen in the clip at the start of this post):

“We’re barely five minutes into the final Reliable Sources and the arrogance and hatred for conservatives that “the truth is not neutral” with Stelter and Carl Bernstein is flowing. They’ve already shown why it’s being canceled.”

“Second segment for Brian Stelter’s final show — the risk to the lives of journalists and how dangerous it is to be one in America because of the far-right. Ah, yes. Being a journalist in America is JUST like reporting in China, Myanmar, North Korea, and Russia!”

I guess he decided to just let it all hang out in his final show. And inviting Carl Bernstein on to the show as a last, desperate demonstration of Stelter’s seriousness – you know, Watergate and all that:

Bernstein was born in February 1944, the son of a radical labor union lawyer and activist mother. Both his parents were secret members of the Communist Party USA.

“A case can be made that [Bernstein] should have disclosed the conflict of interest he brought to his Watergate exposes,” wrote New York media consultant Sidney Goldberg in 2003. “After all, he was brought up as a Nixon hater and readers might have been told that his family regarded Nixon as vile, as an enemy.”

Bernstein’s animus for Nixon is beyond dispute. He has written that anti-Communists such as Nixon and Joseph McCarthy unleashed a “reign of terror” in America. Yet he has always maintained that his motivation in pursuing Nixon was purely journalistic.

Reading things like that, or about the past of famous journalists like Walter Cronkite, or Dan Rather, I have to wonder if any of these “journalists” were ever fair and balanced in covering the Right wing. Author Natasha Crain admits her naivety about them and their gaslighting:

I’ve long known mainstream media is not objective. But I had strangely held onto the assumption that they thought they were being objective and just woefully lacked enough self-awareness to see how crazily biased they were.

Her recent revelation was that they know this and don’t care, but then she did start out as a broadcast journalism major at varsity. She lists at least five ways they gaslight everybody:

  1. Pretty much everyone agrees with how to view issues of cultural importance. If you’re one of the ones who disagree, you’re on the extreme fringe of society. That should tell you something about the accuracy and reasonableness of your views.
  2. Here’s the language that’s acceptable to use if you’re going to be an acceptable member of society.
  3. These are the subjects that are most important to know about and discuss.
  4. These are the things you need to be very afraid of…and the solutions that will make you safe again.
  5. It’s not just us saying these things…look at all these leaders who agree. Trust them even if you don’t trust us.

You can read the details at the link but you see this in the MSM every day and everywhere.

Back to CNN: Stelter is just the start of a purge of their Democrat partisan fanatics in a desperate effort to regain their reputation but I think they’re on the Gannett path. GOP politicians have been refusing to even appear on CNN; aside from the bias, its poor ratings – and those consisting of Democrat fanatics – mean there’s no point.

The day Licht was announced as CNN’s new chief in February, everyone around him knew Stelter was toast, a media insider told Fox News Digital. Those in his orbit had been expecting Stelter to be fired because Licht had complained to peers about the show being bad television. In axing Stelter, Licht’s desires to return the network to the middle and purge unexceptional broadcasters overlapped.
…
Once the coming shakeup at @CNN is done, don’t expect John Berman, Alisyn Camerota, Jim Acosta, Brianna Keilar, Jake Tapper, John King, and Don Lemon to still be at the network OR have their current show assignments.”

You could do the same thing with all the names on that list, as is done in the Stelter clip.

Of course this slow degradation of the US MSM won’t hurt the Democrat Party, since they’ve got Facebook, Twitter and Google on their side to direct people to the “correct” news:

As reported by Post Millennial correspondent and TPUSA Ambassador Katie Daviscourt, Facebook ran interference for President Biden’s failing economic agenda by slapping a “fact-check” on one of the nation’s most accomplished economists.

Not mincing words, Phil Magness, the senior faculty member and Director of Research and Education at the American Institute for Economic Research, tweeted bluntly that a recession is defined as two quarters of negative GDP growth.

This is unpermitted speech, according to the Ministry of Truth, and decided to flag his tweet with a disclaimer.

Magness had had a gutsful and decided to fight back, something helped by his prominence:

“We live in an Orwellian hell-scape,” Magness retorted. “Facebook is now ‘fact-checking’ anyone who questions the White House’s word games. I’m going to have to incorporate ‘hell-scape’ into more of my everyday conversation because — if I’m being honest — it’s probably the best way to describe much of the state of our economy, national security, foreign policy, energy supply, stock market… you get the picture.”

The problem is perhaps less “the MSM” than the people who inhabit it, and those who now inhabit the largest Social Media businesses .