The Jig is Up

I read today that Rachel Maddow is taking a pay cut over at MSNBC.  She will go from making $30 million to $25 million a year.  Well, I guess she’ll still be able to afford all the lesbian leisure wear and sensible shoes her heart desires.  But it must be devastating knowing she’s already peaked and from now on she’ll have to start clipping out coupons to take that trip to Davos.

I guess the changing world isn’t just impacting the deplorables.  The Masters of the Universe haven’t just disrupted the lives of the factory workers whose factories were shipped off to China but they replaced cable television with on-line video games, TikTok and YouTube.  The market for Maddow, Anderson Cooper and the rest of the cable news “stars” at CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News is rapidly shrinking.  The era of thirty or even twenty-million-dollar cable news contracts is over.  That kind of money is reserved for people who can draw enormous audiences.  Joe Rogan is an example and so are the ”influencers” who have YouTube channels that draw tens of millions of viewers.  Meanwhile CNN and MSNBC can’t even break the hundred thousand viewer mark lately for their crummy shows.  And yet all these shows pay their talent millions of dollars.

That math doesn’t work.  As previously discussed, these cable channels will be spun off from their parent companies and forced to sink or swim.  And the only way they can swim is to either:

• Reduce their costs down to almost nothing, or
• Provide value that will attract more customers

But how can people like Joy Reid or Joe Scarborough attract an audience?  They’re talentless hacks.  All they can do is keep reducing their price to match their employer’s death spiral.

But eventually an equilibrium will be reached and a new model will take hold for providing news and opinion to the digital masses.  I’ll be honest I’m not sure exactly what will emerge.  What makes sense is a bunch of subscriptions that run the gamut from hard news outlets that possess reporters in the field, to opinion writers, to entertainers.

Something like that makes sense to me.  After all there was nothing permanent about the cable networks or even the “big three” news teams of the broadcast networks.  All of them were artifacts of the changing landscape created by the waves of innovation in journalism caused by the introduction of first radio, then tv, then cable tv and finally the internet.  All of these were commercial endeavors and each eventually changed shape to accommodate the market forces that developed.

The dominance of leftists in the current media landscape seems to guarantee that the majority of those about to be unemployed will be people I despise.  I can’t pretend that won’t provide me with great satisfaction in the weeks and months ahead.  So many of these people are smug, entitled losers who lack the self-awareness to anticipate what they are heading for.

Well, enough lefty bashing.  Time will tell if what replaces the current system will be an improvement over the MSM.  All I know for sure is that it won’t include Joy Reid and Joe Scarborough pulling down multi-million-dollar salaries.