Mainstream Media: New Cutbacks in Jobs, Bureaus, Stock Prices, Advertising, Ratings

Cutbacks in Everything
--Except Left Wing Rhetoric

When you're Selling What No One's Buying

The big story of the Mainstream Media in the last week is cuts.

Cuts in jobs, in advertising revenue, in circulation, in ratings: in short, cuts in every meaningful indicator of how successful the Mainstream Media is.

Which is to say, they're not.

Not doing their job, not successful.

What the MSM is selling--liberal viewpoints, solutions, hand-wringing, harangues and advice--is the one area news consumers aren't buying.

Some news blurbs from the last week amplify this point.

NBC is closing their Chicago and Dallas bureaus.

NBC: Atlanta, which has managed Miami and New Orleans assignments, will add Dallas. Chicago will report in through the Northeast bureau.

The Liberal Lady, the New York Times is cutting newsroom jobs.

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The Washington Post is closing a printing plant and offering buyouts to all employees.

Washington Post Co. will offer buyouts to employees at its flagship newspaper to cut costs as revenue and readership decline.

Buyouts will be offered to all newspaper employees. The newspaper employs 2,400 people, including 800 in news, she added. Revenue at the publishing division, which includes the newspaper, fell 8 percent to $657.2 million in the first nine months of 2007.

At the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, 100-150 jobs are being cut at each.

Tribune Co. employees were notified Wednesday that hundreds of jobs will be cut at the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other publications — the first cutbacks since billionaire Sam Zell took the media company private last year.

In separate memos, Tribune Publisher Scott Smith said 100 jobs would be cut and his counterpart at the Times, David Hiller, said 100-150 jobs would be eliminated.

Last fall, CNN dropped Reuters--but said the move wasn't about falling ratings and cutting costs.

Honest.

But in a twist, the cable news network CNN asserted that a decision to drop the Reuters news service after 27 years was not done to cut costs.

Newsweek is cutting the amount of copies it is guaranteeing advertisers by a half million.

Newsweek magazine plans to cut its guaranteed paid circulation by 500,000 copies, according to industry magazine Advertising Age.

The 16 percent reduction would lower the number of paid subscribers Newsweek promises advertisers from 3.1 million to 2.6 million, Advertising Age reported, citing people with knowledge of the move.

About a year ago, Time announced cuts in its news operations staff. It said at the time that there was no timetable as to future cuts.

As anyone who follows news closely, the nine MSM companies above are all flagship liberal operations. Whether it's big government, Blame America First, Global Warming, more taxes and regulations or endorsement of Democrat candidates and their programs, the MSM is all liberal, all the time.

In most cases, the MSM "news" shows and editorial staffs operate as a wing of the Democrat National Committee.

Don't expect the continuing MSM death spiral to change the outlook of either the reporting or the personnel responsible for the slide.

All nine of the above MSM mouthpieces staunchly maintain that they are unbiased "news" operations.

Their viewers and readers and in many cases, their stockholders, beg to differ.

And have been for some time now.

NBC denied that they were even scaling back their operations, labeling the cutbacks as streamlining in an "effort to achieve more journalism and less bureaucracy in the newsgathering operation."

They could achieve all of the above aims by simply requiring their newsrooms to drop their liberal viewpoints by hiring a few conservatives and losing the liberal herd mentality that infects their news operations.

When the National Enquirer reported on the John Edwards Love Child Scandal in November, not one--not a single, solitary, lonely--reporter from a MSM outlet asked Edwards one, single, solitary question about it.

NOT ONE ever asked the candidate if he had been in telephone contact with Rielle Hunter--the woman the Enquirer kept under tabs for months after the campaign spirited her out of sight within 5 miles of Edwards' campaign headquarters from New York--since Hunter had found out she was pregnant.

NOT ONE.

In the meantime, their viewers and readers were buying up Enquirers by the millions and Googling "Rielle Hunter" at such a pace that the woman's name became the most-searched for term on the Internet for awhile.

The news public was buying "Rielle Hunter"--and the Mainstream press wasn't selling any. They were selling anything and everything else that they were interested in, not their potential consumers.

[DBKP John Edwards Love Child Scandal Library of 25 stories on John Edwards, Rielle Hunter, the National Enquirer and the MSM news blackout on the story.]

The MSM tries to put the blame for their decline on the medium and hopes to counter it by creating blogs on the Internet. One suspects that they won't be selling anything different on their MSM blogs--and the public won't be doing any buying of their news there, either.

The Mainstream Media should borrow a page from the playbook of one of their heroes, Bill Clinton and have signs printed up:

ITMS

It's the message, stupid.