ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic appeared to be reading from a script and took no questions when he told the 15 employees at 538 they were fired. He handled it this way even though the 15 knew from the previous night’s news reports that they would be fired.
“He simply thanked the employees for their work, told them a human resources staffer would follow up, and ended the meeting,” the Status newsletter reported Thursday. “The entire affair, I’m told, lasted about 15 minutes.”
Shortly afterward, the 538 staffers “had their access to ABC News systems cut off and the site was no longer accessible on the internet.”
This was part of a much bigger Disney Grooming Syndicate layoff that involved 200 staffers across Disney Entertainment and ABC News, which made up about six percent of the staff.
“ABC News staffers told Status that the layoffs were akin to a ‘massacre,’ with “employees … visibly crying and upset as they roamed the hallways of the company’s Manhattan offices on Wednesday.”
“It’s a very somber scene in the building — people crying and upset. Lots of panicked phone calls between staffers trying to make sense of it.” One staffer explained it this way, “You just feel like you’ve made it to level seven of ‘Squid Games’ at this point if you’ve survived.”
Well, the good news is that President Trump is bringing manufacturing and energy jobs back to America, so maybe something will open up on an oil rig or assembly line.
#LearnToCoalmine
Assuming the story is true, what I really love about it is the hypocrisy. ABC News, like the rest of the regime media, has been running around asking us to pity the poor federal bureaucrats losing their jobs at the hands of the DOGE audits, and here ABC News is bloodlessly firing their own people, hundreds of them.
The other thing I love about this story is that 538 is gone-gone-gone. Earlier this week, I had written about why that was such a big deal, how it meant truth had shattered the effectiveness of the 538 propaganda site, but The Other McCain made an even better point this week that flew right by me (forgive me, I’ve had the flu for seven days): Why didn’t ABC News try to sell 538?
Perhaps a better metric of 538’s value would be the fact that ABC News didn’t sell the site — for which their parent company paid a pretty penny, years ago — but rather shut it down. Had there been any market value to the site, why weren’t there any other media operations offering cash to acquire it from ABC News? The obvious answer is that 538 was always a money-losing operation, first for the New York Times, and then under Disney ownership, first at ESPN and then at ABC News. The salaries of the staff always exceeded whatever revenue was generated by 538. Nate Silver goes on to say there is a “bright future” for the kind of “data journalism” that 538 did, by which I suppose he means that there’s always a market for predicting elections wrong, so long as your error favors Democrats.
With the collapse of cable TV, left-wing corporations like Disney can no longer afford to build Propaganda Potemkin Villages like 538.
You see, cable TV was a cash cow that delivered billions and billions of unearned dollars to entertainment corporations for decades. Merit had nothing to do with the money earned. They got paid simply for providing a network, not if people watched it. It is called a carriage fee and it came right out of your bill (which is why cable bills are so high). All that free money made it tolerable for Disney to lose a load of money on a propaganda outlet like 538 that told voters The science says Democrats always win so Republicans should just stay home.
Streaming changed all that. People canceled their cable packages and moved to streaming. So, instead of 100 million households paying cable carriage fees, that number dipped to about 60 million (and dips further every quarter). Worse still, unless you are Netflix, you’re streaming service is either barely breaking even or is losing money. Suddenly a 538 propaganda site is something you can no longer afford.
What’s more, a CNN (Warner Bros.) or MSNBC (Universal) can’t buy it because they are in the same financial boat.
The New York Times already offloaded 538, and the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are losing around $100 million per year. Tee hee.
Above all, 538 just wasn’t effective anymore. We were told by 538 that Kamala Harris had a 51 percent chance of defeating Trump, and he ended up leaving her in the dust when the whole point of 538 was to suppress the GOP vote.
The tally so far…
- Jim Acosta
- Norah O’Donnell
- Chuck Todd
- Andrea Mitchell
- Chris Wallace
- Joy Reid
- Neil Cavuto
- Alex Wagner
- Ayman Mohyeldin
- Katie Phang
- Jonathan Capehart
- Lester Holt
- 538
Play this in the background.
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