CNN Brass Parties While Media Layoffs Surge

RUSH: You know, we hear the Drive-By Media continually complaining about the economy. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, David Bauder of the AP reports: “ABC News is airing a special Friday on struggling families in Camden, N.J., because many Americans see more images of what poverty looks like overseas than in their own country, Diane Sawyer said on [yesterday].” Sawyer’s ” 10 p.m. EST report, ‘Waiting on the World to Change, ‘contrasts the lives of children in a small city considered among the nation’s most dangerous with those in a nearby prosperous suburb, Morristown. ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve seen what poverty looks like in our own country,’ said Sawyer.” It has? Democrats talk about it each and every day. Soup line America. Gotta get the minimum wage up! There’s poverty out there, children are starving! Ted Kennedy talks about it in the floor of the Senate every day. Now if there’s poverty, ladies and gentlemen, it must mean that there is a sector or two of the American economy not doing well.
I think we actually are in a depression, not a recession, but a depression in at least one sector of the market and of the economy. Listen to this: “U.S. media job cuts surged 88 percent in 2006 from the previous year, a downsizing trend expected to continue this year, a survey said Thursday. The media industry slashed 17,809 jobs last year, a nearly two-fold increase from the 9,453 cuts in 2005, outplacement consultancy Challenger Gray & Christmas said. The figure was the industry’s largest annual job-cut total since 43,420 media job cuts accompanied the collapse of the technology bubble in 2001, the survey said…. Media companies, including the New York Times Co. and Time Inc., have already laid off 2,000 employees in 2007,” and we’re just barely into the first month here! Wow, US media jobs slashed 88%! Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that they’re ignoring the needs of their audience? Do you think it might have anything to do with the fact that the Drive-By Media is the one business in America where you, the customer, are not only always wrong, you are a blithering idiot?
And every suggestion or complaint you make is met with, “You just don’t understand what we do.” So we get these job cuts at print institutions, newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks and so forth, layoffs left and right, audiences are down, advertising is down. They’re always complaining and whining and moaning about it. None of that’s happening here. We haven’t had a down year yet since we started. I’m talking about gross revenues. It has not happened. But it is happening in a lot of these other places. These places do not connect with their audience. They preach or condescend to them. There’s a whole bunch of factors. Did you see this? CNN had a hundred executives go to the Bahamas, the exclusive Atlantis Resort. That is a cool place. I’ve been over there. A hundred people went down there last week or something, including the two head honchos, Jim Walton and John Klein — while layoffs are taking place at CNN, while the people that work there have been told to expect maybe cutbacks, certainly no raises unless you’re Anderson Cooper, “the Paris Hilton of TV news.” He got four million bucks a year! I couldn’t care less about this accept for the fact that it’s people like this that are always whining and moaning about CEOs everywhere else in the business, who are lavishly treating themselves to trips and raises and so forth, and here’s a bunch of libs at CNN doing the same thing, and they said, “Well, the reason for this is that we exceeded our budget last year. We brought in more than we budgeted and we’re celebrating and we rewarded those people that did that,” but no pay raises for the serfs. No pay raises for the worker bees. No, just a trip over there to Atlantis for a hundred or so big-time executives. So next time you hear anybody at CNN start ripping and moaning into other CEOs’ pay and how they run their businesses, just remember: CNN does it, too.