The broader job market has remained largely robust amid the Federal Reserve‘s monetary tightening, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at the latest headlines about the news media.
MSNBC recently fired nearly 100 staffers across nine different shows, including progressive panjandrum Joy Reid, after CNN announced in January that it would cut around 200 jobs, or 6% of its current workforce. And now, just a month after the Washington Post announced it would lay off 4% of its workforce, the paper’s billionaire owner blew up its once-prestigious opinion page, with Jeff Bezos declaring that the rebooted op-ed page will write “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” the Amazon founder wrote in an X post. “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”
Perhaps Bezos got earnestly and entirely fed up — despite years of attempting to placate the Left with a $10 billion investment to combat climate change, raising Amazon’s minimum wage to $15 per hour before it was cool, and embracing DEI, LGBT, and the rest of the alphabet soup. Perhaps overpaid progressive parrots shouldn’t have spent years calling the billionaire who was responsible for their paychecks a “fascist.” Or maybe President Donald Trump’s Reconquista of Washington has merely given the rest of the castrated billionaire class permission to find their cajones back.
Perhaps. Or, Bezos, a competent businessman sees the writing on the wall, and namely that more of the same from the Post, MSNBC, et al. simply isn’t very good business.
Four years of the same unchanging and unyielding hysteria that Trump was Hitler, Israel the perpetrator of genocide, billionaires = bad, and “democracy dies in darkness” quite literally decimated the Washington Post’s viewership. Compared to the 22.5 million daily readers it inherited as former President Joe Biden took office, daily readership was down nearly 90% by “Brat Summer,” when, theoretically, left-wing hype should have been at its highest. The paper ran a net loss of some $100 million across 2024, with fewer than half as many visitors during the election month of November 2024 as in November 2020.
The story is largely the same for MSNBC. Compared with the February prior, its average viewership fell by 9% to just 111,000 in the first full month of Trump 2.0. Prime-time viewership was down 16%, to just 1.13 million. For its part, barely half a million viewers tune in to CNN in prime time.
It’s not that peddling progressive agitprop is always bad business. The New York Times has successfully packaged its uniformly anti-Trump editorial page with its blockbuster online gaming, cooking, and athletic verticals to the tune of more than 11 million subscribers, netting the Gray Lady an average revenue-per-user increase of nearly 2% over the past year.
But of course, the fact that Bezos’s message meant anything partisan at all explains the problem for the rest of the progressive press. As recently as a quarter-century ago, “free markets” was a mantle still championed by some Democrats, and even more recently than that, “personal liberties” were seen as the backbone of liberal ideology. And yet, from the ACLU to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the institutional guardians of the Left made a concerted effort to cede those causes to the mosh posh of crunchy anti-war peaceniks, classical conservatives, frat bros, and ordinary Americans who make up MAGA.
TRUMP IS REMAKING, NOT BREAKING, DC
So when Bezos demands that his paper not just coalesce once more around neutrality, but rather specific, lowercase-L liberal values, he’s not just making a moral overture or a principled one, but also a strategic one.
Of course, his business calculation also reveals a bit of hubris, mainly the insinuation that the center-right commentariat isn’t already saturated with the practiced pens you read here at the Washington Examiner. But unlike collectivists and communists, we conservatives welcome the competition. We simply trust that readers have a taste for true believers over turncoats who waded to the Right because Bezos bade them to.