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It turns out that people don’t want to pay big bucks for fake news. That’s the story coming out of Los Angeles after the Times called an “emergency meeting” to discuss massive layoffs, claiming this is the “big one.”

Things haven’t been looking good for the LA Times as of late. Actually, back in June, the LA Times started its slow and painful death by eliminating 13% of their newsroom.

NPR:

The Los Angeles Times informed its newsroom Wednesday that it would lay off about 13% of the paper’s journalists, the latest in a string of blows to major American news outlets.

It’s the first major round of job cuts since the paper was acquired in 2018 by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire entrepreneur and investor based in Southern California. At the time, he told NPR that he wanted to protect the L.A. Times from a series of cutbacks that had afflicted the paper under previous owners based in Chicago.

During the pandemic, there was a far smaller round of layoffs. The paper and labor union negotiated a work-sharing agreement and furloughs in lieu of layoffs.

Ben Mullin of the New York Times had this to say in his X post about the latest disastrous news for our propaganda media:

Here’s a closeup of the image Ben shared:

The turmoil at the LA Times is no shocker to those who’ve been keeping an eye on the mainstream media, especially since 2016. That’s when Trump clinched the presidency, and it all went downhill. Suddenly, the façade crumbled—reporters showed their true colors, proving they’re more left-wing activists than genuine journalists. Since that time, trust in the media has plummeted to levels so low that they’re now giving Congress a run for their unpopular, disliked money. As a matter of fact, the bias is so off the charts and so painfully obvious at this point that the folks over at The Economist can even see it.

The Economist:

Public trust in American media has plummeted since the 1990s. Most of this decline is among conservatives, spurred by Republican charges of liberal bias from avowedly non-partisan outlets. Such claims are hard to assess fairly: stories viewed by one party as following the facts are often seen by the other as ideological.

Most public estimates of news sources’ partisan leanings rely on subjective ratings. Political scientists seeking an objective approach have used the language in politicians’ speeches to set a baseline and compared stories with that. However, most studies in this vein look at the period before 2016; do not discriminate between politics and other topics; and focus on either tv or written journalism, but not both.

In an effort to provide a measure of partisan slant that is comprehensive, impartial and up-to-date, we have applied this academic approach to the output in recent years of a wide range of news sources. We find that there is indeed an affinity between the media and the left, because journalists tend to prefer the language used by Democratic lawmakers. Moreover, this disparity has grown since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. As a result, the number of media sources covering politics in balanced language has dwindled.

The Economist actually conducted their own study and discovered what we’ve known all along: yes, our media is left-wing propaganda trash.

This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets. In 2017 CNN used more Republican terms than Democratic ones, while MSNBC and the evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC had only modestly left-leaning scores of around 1.5 phrases per 10,000. By 2022, the broadcast channels and cnn had Democratic leanings of near 2.5, and MSNBC had reached 5.5, putting it twice as far from the centre as Fox.

In written journalism the shift has been smaller but in the same direction. In 2017 the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN’s website all had mild Democratic leanings: around 1.5. This put them a bit closer to conservative sources like Fox News’s website, whose average Republican slant in 2017-22 was two, than to left-wing sites like Vox, whose average Democratic leaning in those years was seven. By 2022 these sites’ left-of-centre slants had grown to four, three and three, leaving them much closer to lefty alternatives.

You get what you plant. The situation at the Los Angeles Times was bound to happen; it was just a matter of time. The great LA Times was never meant to be an opinion blog, a hub for extremists to echo their views, or an outlet for harpies to screech their feelings into the void. It was always meant to be a newspaper for all Angelenos, and even all Americans. Historically, the LA Times was of the highest caliber, featuring some of the greatest writing chronicling life and times in the Wild West in one of America’s greatest cities in America’s promised land. But when you ditch your core identity to push a political agenda, you’re bound to lose the trust and readership of many who seek a more balanced perspective. And when you abandon all standards of writing, you end up with a newspaper filled with illiterate trash.

In this era of round-the-clock news, deep political divides, and universities churning out hordes of illiterate midwits, maybe it’s unrealistic to expect fair, interesting, and high-quality reporting. However, at the very least, there should be some honesty in branding. Perhaps the LA Times should actually be called “The Progressive LA Tabloid.” Truth in journalism matters, right? But the way things are going, there might not even be a Progressive LA Tabloid down the road, as people are now jaded and disillusioned and have turned away from the propaganda media.

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