Fewer mainstream media outlets means, the left is limited in its ability to craft the narrative of our society
Biden makes shots at GOP, media at White House Correspondents' Dinner
President Biden tries his hand at comedy in front of the press at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Journalism has fallen on hard times. But if the industry is in a recession, leftist media outlets are in a depression. So are many of those who work there. And it just got worse.
Many of the top far-left media outlets have either had layoffs or closed the doors entirely. This isn’t just traditional liberal news operations like The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, ABC News and NPR, which have all had recent layoffs. Outlets like Vice, Jezebel, Texas Observer and the news section of Buzzfeed have closed, though Jezebel was relaunched.
Others like Vox, The New Yorker, Now This and The Intercept have had layoffs. New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin mocked the Now This layoff announcement as reading "like a page from the Big Book of Corporate Jargon." It includes a line straight out of "The Office": "as part of our broader initiative to realign our resources."
President Biden talks to reporters outside the White House. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The Intercept isn’t just in layoff trouble. According to Semafor, "The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025." Reporter Ken Klippenstein just resigned, bashing a "newsroom increasingly [that has] become dominated by management and bureaucrats." Klippenstein has half a million followers on Elon Musk’s X and now takes those supporters to Substack.
But nowhere is the collapse of leftist media more obvious than at Participant Media. Participant was the movie company behind the Al Gore "An Inconvenient Truth" movie and a host of other popular, propaganda flicks. After 20 years and 21 Oscars, eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll shut down his pet project. The New York Times called Participant, "Hollywood’s pre-eminent maker of activist entertainment."
Former Vice President Al Gore in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
It reported that Participant is letting go "most of its 100 employees" except those it needs to complete a few more propaganda flicks like "‘BLKNWS,’ about what the media leave out, or misrepresent, in reporting on Black culture."
Participant’s About page describes the company as, "Pushing culture and the industry forward since 2004." What it should say is, "Pushing culture left."
The film company has been at the forefront attacking businesses and creating leftist scare movies on everything from climate (two Gore movies) and fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas in separate movies), guns, nuclear power, food and pretty much every leftist freakout.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the subject of two projects from Participant Media. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, file)
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In particular, Participant became host to movies that made heroes of prominent liberals or celebrated its friends in the traditional media. That meant two movies about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another about former President Jimmy Carter, and one about activist and union organizer Cesar Chavez.
The press pictures are a hint of the company’s close relationship with journalists. There’s "Good Night and Good Luck" about Edward R. Murrow vs. Sen. Joe McCarthy. Or the star-studded "The Post," about Watergate. And "Page One," a New York Times documentary.
These weren’t obscure lefty agenda movies either. These featured the biggest names in Hollywood in front, or behind, the camera. Actors Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Donald Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Jamie Foxx were joined by directors Jodie Foster, Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard.
George Clooney was among the Hollywood stars featured in Participant projects. (Photo by Joe Maher/Getty Images for Warner Brothers)
The movies led to social media campaigns, news stories and more. The climate movies made Gore a wonky star for a time and helped promote his global warming agenda, which, of course, didn’t include limiting his own carbon footprint.
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Except, that stuff isn’t popular anymore, because the market doesn’t support it. (Shed your tears here.) The Times explained that, "Eat-your-broccoli documentaries and dramas that explore underrepresented communities (both Participant sweet spots) are harder to sell than ever.)
All that is gone, like wind blowing away tear gas at an Occupy Wall Street encampment. (Another Participant documentary was: "99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film.")
That means, the left is limited in its ability to craft the narrative of our society. Oh sure, there will be movies, TV shows and more. But what Participant brought to the table was top-flight talent.
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Think of the major issues of the day – immigration, Biden’s disastrous economy, transgenderism and more. No more fancy propaganda films about any of them. But it doesn’t stop there.
We are barely six months out till the presidential election. The future of the presidency and Congress both hang by a thread. President Biden is the weakest incumbent America may have ever seen, and stronger ones still lost. The inflation we were told was going away is getting stronger. Campus protests and antisemitism dominate the news, alienating both right and left. And every White House foreign policy initiative is a massive failure.
A student protester parades a Palestinian flag outside the entrance to Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University, Tuesday, April 30, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool)
Then there’s former President Trump, who is constantly under courtroom assault. If things weren’t so bad for Biden, Trump’s bad court stories would dominate the news cycle.
Except, the outlets Biden needs aren’t anywhere near as strong as they were last election. Not the legacy media and certainly not the leftist media. And social media has gutted the entire news industry. Facebook’s algorithm has cut down on news stories, trying to stay somewhat out of America’s political combat.
At this rate, Biden could find himself a victim of the very thing his supporters despise – the free-market system.
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Dan Gainor is a freelance opinion editor for Fox News Digital.
