By Mike Huckabee
June 13, 2022
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We’re mad as heck and we aren’t gonna take it anymore: The newspaper chain Gannett may have finally gotten “woke” in a good way, as in “Woke up to reality and realized they’d go out of business if they didn’t stop annoying readers with leftist lectures.”
The Daily Mail reports that a committee of editors presented a report to Gannett in April, warning them that people are turning away from USA Today and other Gannett-owned papers because they’re fed up with the leftist bias, both in editorials and supposed “news” stories. The editors said that not only are these leftist editorials among the least-read content, but were frequently cited as reasons for canceling subscriptions.
They noted that the public’s trust in the news media had plummeted in recent years due to leftwing bias, and that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think. They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues.” Sounds like the readers are definitely smarter than the writers in that regard. They also suggested that the papers hire writers who aren’t leftwing activists. Ironically, that probably means hiring journalists who didn’t attend “journalism” school.
In response, Gannett is scaling back the number of editorials and ending political endorsements except in local races. This reminds me of the old joke about what you call it when a thousand lawyers are dropped into shark-infested waters: “A good start.” Both CNN and Gannett are finally scaling back the leftist activism as a survival measure, but there’s still so much of it infesting “journalism” that the people writing it may not even realize they’re doing it. Maybe they just assume that since everyone they know is a Republican-hating leftist, they spew that attitude without even thinking about it.
The entertainment media echo chambers are particularly bad about this. One of my writers who handles pop culture stories canceled his subscription to weekly Variety (for which he was paying a rock bottom professional rate of something like a dollar a year) because the leftist bias was so thick that even at two cents an issue, it wasn’t worth it. He was also a longtime subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, where you would find Obama cheerleading or Bush and Trump bashing in everything from record reviews to movie previews. He didn’t have to cancel that because they recently stopped publishing it.
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