Reality bites the leftist media with shake-ups, layoffs amid decline

If the state of the legacy media as 2025 begins was put to music, the only appropriate soundtrack is the iconic theme from “Jaws.” 

There’s blood in the journalistic water, and viewers and readers are fleeing the same way beachgoers did on Amity Island the moment they saw that ominous fin emerging from the sea.

Underscoring that visual, this week we’ve seen MSNBC President Rashida Jones running for the exit and The Washington Post making even more cuts to a staff that has shrunk almost as fast as its subscription base. 

That newspaper’s daily online traffic leading up to the 2024 election hovered anywhere from 2.5 million to 3 million daily users, according to internal data reported by Semafor. 

Context: In January 2021, the WaPo website had 22.5 million daily active users. 

Result: In just a four-year span of perpetually robust and chaotic news cycles, it’s lost 85 to 90% of its audience — and suffered two straight years of $100 million-plus in losses.

About 100 jobs were slashed last week, and prominent reporters and columnists are fleeing the paper en masse. 

Owner Jeff Bezos seems to understand one big reason why all this is happening. 

“The Washington Post and The New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves,” he wrote.

But staffers are blaming Bezos for the mess they’re in. 

“We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave,” reads a petition signed by 400 WaPo “journalists.”

This is insane: Without Bezos keeping the paper afloat while losing hundreds of millions of dollars, these people would be on the street.

And as for those “distinguished colleagues,” one who flounced out the door this week was unhinged columnist Jennifer Rubin, who literally argued after the presidential election that Trump and Republicans “want to kill children.” 

At MSNBC, which might as well be called M-E-S-S-NBC, things are no better.

Ratings are in a seemingly irreversible slide.

This past Monday, for example: As Jones tendered her resignation after four years at the helm, the network averaged just 631,000 viewers.

In the key 25-54 demographic, which dictates ad sales, viewership sank to just 53,000, according to Nielsen.  

Context: 631,000 total viewers is decidedly less than the total population of El Paso, Tex. (678,915). And 53,000 viewers in the demo barely beats the capacity of Yankee Stadium (52,325).

This is a network that’s in more than 80 million homes. 

So what’s MSNBC’s solution? 

More Rachel Maddow! 

Yep.

The channel, which is such a leftist echo chamber that it can’t even bring itself to put one pro-Trump voice on the air, is quadrupling down on its most blindly partisan host.

Maddow will now go back to doing what average Americans do and actually work five days a week, after shrinking her schedule to a once-weekly show back in 2022.

Viewers can expect plenty of anti-Trump hyperbole-on-steroids and never-ending monologues from the 9 p.m. host, who is currently finishing a distant second to Fox’s Sean Hannity. 

Meanwhile, over on CNN, conservative Scott Jennings has been the only analyst on the network making headlines these days.

Oftentimes, it’s former George W. Bush aide Jennings versus three or four hysterical liberals in a panel debate — which he seems to win every time with his pointed candor and sharp Kentuckian wit. 

The smart thing for CNN to do, of course, would be to award Jennings his own show.

Its primetime lineup is a wreck, with the network struggling to average 300,000 viewers from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.

More context: 300,000 viewers is about 100,000 fewer than the total population of Wichita, Kan. 

In comparison, Fox News averaged 2.4 million viewers in primetime in 2024, eight times CNN’s current audience. 

But awarding a conservative a full show would simply not be tolerated by other CNN hosts.

Precedent: CNN tried to pivot to the center under then-president Chris Licht in 2023, including (gasp!) a network town hall for candidate Donald Trump.

The inmates revolted, and Licht was out not long after.

The move-to-the-center experiment failed because, despite the wishes of some executives, CNN’s on-air hosts and reporters have no interest in objective reporting and analysis. 

Therein lies the problem: Not unlike in politics, nothing changes until leadership changes.

California will continue to rapidly decline under a showman like Gavin Newsom, who is all bubbles and no bath.

Same with New York and Kathy Hochul. 

And as Trump returns to the White House, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and most legacy media are all in the same boat . . . one that’s sinking fast in shark-infested waters. 

Joe Concha is a Fox News contributor and author of the upcoming book “The Greatest Comeback Ever: Inside Trump’s Big Beautiful Campaign.”