It has now been a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth is still audible across the legacy media landscape. In one sense, that’s rather shocking: Why, precisely, should members of the media be so apoplectic about a billionaire taking over a social media company from other millionaires, pledging to loosen restrictions on dissemination of speech? In another sense, the outrage is perfectly predictable: The legacy media oligopoly is now under threat.
In both a memo to staff and a story about the network on CNBC.com, CNN boss Chris Licht marked six months this week with the struggling liberal network by announcing he’s been tasked with cost cuts and layoffs as, according to CNBC, CNN’s profit “is set to drop blow $1 billion this year” and Warner Bros. Discovery is aiming to layoff 1,000 people from its 40,000-workforce.
In objectively welcome news, CNBC also revealed Licht will continue to move CNN back toward reality and away from what Licht called “the quick sugar high of ratings and outrage.”
Fully 84% of registered voters named the Mainstream Media as a threat to Democracy. Nearly 60% of voters called the MSM a “major threat.”
The media apparently has no bottom in the free fall from its golden days decades ago.
The latest sign: Gallup today revealed that the percentage of Americans who have “no trust” in journalism outpaces a “great deal/fair amount” for the first time ever.
“Just 7% of Americans have ‘a great deal’ of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have ‘a fair amount,” said Gallup in dishing up the depressing news for media outlets.
Never judge a celebrity by how the media paints him
The network moves on from its embarrassing partisan past, but can he?
Don Lemon is a dinosaur at CNN — and it shows.
Thanks to the network’s new CEO Chris Licht, who seems to be driven by the radical notion that gaining viewers is more important than virtue-signaling, the pendulum has shifted. There have been small glimpses of CNN’s move back to more straight-news-style programming.
Another day, another spasm of violence in Philadelphia, a major city where George Soros spent $1.7 million to elect far-left Democrat District Attorney Larry Krasner. Yet, typically, the networks on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning mostly ignored the shooting of five teenagers at a local Philadelphia high school.
The scandal around Patricia Schlesinger, former head of Berlin-based broadcaster RBB, has refocused attention on Germany’s complicated network of public broadcasters. Here’s how they’re organized.
It’s much worse than the pic shows. Canada seems bent on a similar set up.
But there are indeed a relatively large number of public broadcasters in Germany, including 21 TV channels and as many as 83 radio stations, funded mainly through the Rundfunkbeitrag levy (literally “broadcast contribution”). Currently set at €18.36 ($18.83) per month, each household in Germany is obliged to pay this fee, which brings in over €8 billion a year. While Deutsche Welle is also publicly funded, its budget comes directly from the federal government, rather than the Rundfunkbeitrag.
It’s an interesting read. Attempts to defund Germany’s media octopus have been dismissed as populist by “journalists.”
Tonight the NewsBusters staff is attending the Media Research Center’s 35th Anniversary Gala, “Night of the Unwoke!”
To mark this luminous event we’ve put together the 35 most obnoxious quotes of the MRC’s history.
Above, a British police officer works to keep the vibrancy from getting out of hand in Leicester.
One of the frequent themes of this blog is that the news media exist primarily not to report the news, but to manage the Narrative. This from the BBC is a perfect example:
Police and community leaders have called for calm after large numbers of people became involved in disorder in parts of East Leicester.
There are no real journalists in America’s major newsrooms.
Late Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon broke the explosive story that Igor Danchenko, the Russian analyst who lied to the FBI about his role in creating the discredited Steele dossier, stayed on the FBI payroll as a confidential informant until just before the 2020 election.
TORONTO – The head of Bell Media’s parent company says the decision to end Lisa LaFlamme’s contract had nothing to do with her age, gender or grey hair.
Mirko Bibic, president and CEO of BCE Inc. & Bell Canada, says removing the longtime CTV National News anchor instead reflects massive changes to traditional broadcasting in Canada.
In a LinkedIn post, he says the days when viewers wait until 11 p.m. to get their news are gone and that change is necessary to ensure Bell Media can provide its journalists with the resources they need across all platforms where news is consumed.
What world do these people live in? Folks lose jobs with dire real-life consequences for they and their families every day but somehow LaFlamme’s exit is a national tragedy.
Nobody I know watched CTV news at 11.
How podcasts have become misinformation machines — and what can be done about it
“… That’s part of the appeal of podcasts for listeners who feel disenfranchised from mainstream news and media.
“There has been a clamouring in recent years for a totally independent and isolated and bubble-wrapped media ecosystem on the right — and they’ve created it,” Ling said.
“They’ve created it thanks to a ton of money from some investors and ideologues, but also because there’s been just an outpouring of enthusiasm.”
Not satisfied that the Left dominates Canada’s government paid media Rachel and friends denounce the success of scary right wing podcasts. Seriously. It’s the same old MSM propaganda tactics at work, create a “scare” to advance an agenda and demonize dissent.
“Journalist” Rachel Gilmore travels in the usual circles.
One of the “experts” cited is Ahmed Al-Rawi, he is the typical sort of left wing ideologue employed at our universities who refers to “hookers” as front line pandemic workers. Loves him his Palestine too, very pleased to remind us that so does Salman Rushdie.
That’s a wrap for CNN host Brian Stelter. The Reliable Sources host who ineptly attempted to play the role of objective media critic — at CNN of all places — was fired on Thursday.
At NewsBusters Stelter was the subject of many a blog because he so often exposed his leftist bias in his copious criticisms of Republicans and news outlets (like Fox News) that refused to carry water for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The Freebeacon riff…
The ousted CNN host was a hitman on behalf of the media
One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter.
The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name.
