Journalism experienced one of its darkest days last week when the Los Angeles Times laid off 115 of my fellow left-wing activists, roughly 20 percent of the entire staff. Already the reverberations are being felt in Hollywood, where crucial journalistic pieces have been scuttled, including one examining why it’s insensitive for Holocaust films to exclude black, brown, and transgender Jews from being murdered by Nazis.
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Don’t believe me? That’s the problem with modern-day journalism. Nobody believes us any more, for reasons I’ve yet to define. The late Rush Limbaugh once said that journalism is the only business where the customer is always wrong. And it’s the only thing Rush ever got correct.
Our customers, by and large, are uneducated and racist and need to be told what to think. When they complain about consequential stories like “White drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color,” they merely grunt their own ignorance because we all know that only white people drive in Los Angeles and, unlike the minority population, do not breath air.
Sadly, the LA Times’ layoffs also greatly impacted journalists of color. Yes, it’s true, some white people were laid off, too, along with some Jews, I’m sure. But who cares? As a cis white male who reads anything published by Ibram X. Kendi, I am especially outraged that I still have a job while the Latina who called the African-American Larry Elder a white supremacist lost hers.
Let me explain it in words that America’s unwashed masses who don’t have a degree in Gender Dysphoric Dance Theory can understand: You need journalists like me now more than ever. Without us, who will champion free speech while trying to shut down media platforms that broadcast opinions that diverge from ours? Who will, in all new and original ways, compare Donald Trump and his minions to fascists? True, everyone on MSNBC and CNN can fill that void, but we need it in print, too.
It’s not just the LA Times that’s reeling. Sports Illustrated literally no longer exists after a licensing deal fell through, leading to mass layoffs. You all know SI, whose chauvinistic swimsuit issue catered to a majority of unathletic, Monday-morning-quarterbacking, straight white men. SI editors righty decided that if there’s one thing those hopelessly horny shlubs want a female swimsuit model to have, it’s a penis. That’s why it featured a transgender cover model on its swimsuit issue in late 2023, perfectly illustrating that it understood its core audience. Naturally, the conservative pigs oinked displeasure when they should’ve been forced to celebrate what men must find attractive in the 21st century.
Moral superiority is the cornerstone of any successful journalistic endeavor, and SI exemplified this with a 2021 piece asking, “Why Does MLB Still Allow Synchronized, Team-Sanctioned Racism in Atlanta?” What was the racism? Something that’s almost as vile as a burning cross, or a dangling noose: Atlanta Braves fans performing the tomahawk chop at the World Series.
The piece described the chop as “unconscionable. At every home game, fans raise and lower their right arms in unison, howling a mock war chant.”
It’s almost as though Braves fans are the post-apocalyptic barbarians clinging to the bars of the Thunderdome in Mad Max. Two Braves enter! One Brave leave! World Series coverage needs forays into why fans for one of the teams are no better than a bunch of baseball-hat-wearing Bull Connors, yet the overt Braves racism is lost on absolutely everyone except for those of us in the newsroom. The everyday reader must be made more self-aware.
And that’s why we journalists must maintain our constant moral haranguing. If you, the little people, aren’t offended by absolutely everything that exists in the context of its disproportionate impact on race, then we must virtue signal to our fellow journalists that we are.
Also, journalists must be protected from the economic laws of reality. Should a newspaper lose $100 million a year — and is owned by a billionaire — then the billionaire should either just eat the loss and buy one less money-hemorrhaging newspaper or lay off everyone else who is a white male and not a journalist. We journalists can always bag our soy lunches and have no need for a cafeteria that serves sushi every day. (Firing the Asian sushi makers is acceptable, as their SAT scores are too high.)
Here is my advice for the future journalists of America who will soon face unemployment at the end of every business quarter: Don’t change anything that you are doing. Continue to write “Fact Check” pieces that really are “Acceptable Opinion Check” pieces. Bray that “democracy is in danger” when you really mean that “liberalism is in danger.” Write opinion columns titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.” But whatever you do, don’t mock journalists’ job losses. That would be ghoulish and unnecessary.
Matt Manochio can be found on X @MattManochio.
