Newsrooms facing ‘inmates-running-the-asylum situation’ with liberal staffers ruling the roost, watchdogs say
Many prominent mainstream news organizations are facing an "inmates-running-the-asylum situation" after liberal employees have failed to get on the same page with business-minded bosses, according to media critics.
The ownership of the Washington Post, as well as the Los Angeles Times, irked staffers when ending the decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates last year and continued to bother liberal employees with recent changes to their opinion sections. MSNBC’s biggest stars have gone on-air to condemn network management and other newsroom overlords have been publicly rebuked by their staff. While many media leaders continue to turn a blind eye to the liberal groupthink that has infiltrated newsrooms, others have pushed back on disgruntled employees.
"At long last, some executives at establishment journalism outlets have figured out that their staffers are not necessarily interested in being surrogates for the news-consuming public they are presumably supposed to serve. Instead, most newsrooms are filled with activist journalists living in a groupthink world where they have hired new reporters and editors who are supposed to think just like them," DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.
The latest example came when Martin Varsavsky, a Jewish tech mogul who sits on Politico parent company Axel Springer’s supervisory board, accused the outlet of "one sided Hamas support."
Politico published an Associated Press report headlined, "Israel hits Gaza with new airstrikes that kill at least 200," that did not go over well with Varsavsky.
"I am on the board of Axel Springer that owns Político. I consider this article one sided Hamas support. It fails to mention that the airstrikes were aimed at eliminating top Hamas military and that Israel was successful at doing so. It also quotes casualty figures given by Hamas that are not believed to be accurate," Varsavsky wrote on X.
In a since-deleted follow-up that was reported by Jewish Insider, Varsavsky reportedly wrote "most journalists are woke and to the left of the general public" and "management does not dare to fire them."
McCall believes a lack of intellectual diversity has led to declines in news consumption and the bottom line.
"Not surprisingly, news consumers have drifted to confirmation news sources, podcasters, and so on, or simply become news bystanders who don't pay attention to the news," McCall said.
"Owners of media outlets need to maintain their courage to reinvent the news industry, restore credibility, and build newsrooms that are committed to fairness and serving audiences, and not the staffers," McCall added. "That might mean some housecleaning of the more activist staffers and replacing them with reporters who understand the higher mission of journalism."
In another recent act of defiance, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently used her primetime perch to scold her bosses over Joy Reid’s program "The ReidOut" being canceled by the liberal network last month.
"It is absolutely an inmates-running-the-asylum situation, and this is why nearly every media organization is failing. Woke work culture, with woke management and a woke human resources department, pushing woke messaging is a recipe for disaster for any business - especially one that's failing, like most liberal publications and networks," Heritage Foundation media fellow Tim Young told Fox News Digital.
"Most major media organizations – particularly newspapers and leftist cable news channels – have seemingly sunk themselves by focusing on everything but profit over the past decade – and it's partially due to their focus on placating the woke, entitled mob they have inside their organizations."
Young said that management at these outlets should have started making better decisions years ago, and it might be too late at this point.
"For many of these organizations, they're beyond simply needing to shift a few staff members and a bit of strategy to improve - they need to literally start over from scratch," he said.
The trend of rank-and-file journalists not seeing eye-to-eye with management has been a major theme in recent years.
Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong sparked complaints from staffers when he wanted to add conservative voices to the paper’s opinion section, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos saw opinion editor David Shipley step down when he announced the Post opinion page would be completely revamped, focusing on "writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."
Last year, Soon-Shiong and Bezos sparked internal backlash when they nixed planned endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris from their respective papers.
LIBERAL PUNDITS DUB WASHINGTON POST'S LATEST OPINION SHAKE-UP A 'TERRIBLE TRAGEDY,' SLAM JEFF BEZOS
NBC News and MSNBC were overwhelmed in controversy fueled by their own staffers earlier in 2024 after the company hired former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor. A variety of high-profile anchors and pundits publicly disavowed McDaniel's hiring, citing her alleged actions in trying to block the certification of Michigan's election results in 2020.
Hosts like Maddow, Nicolle Wallace and Jen Psaki spoke out against the move, and staffers got their way when NBC News announced McDaniel was being let go only four days after her hiring was announced.
In October, left-wing staffers at CBS News lashed out at their colleague, "CBS Mornings" co-host Tony Dokoupil, over a tough but civil interview exchange with progressive author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Dokoupil, who is Jewish and has children living in Israel, angered liberal colleagues by suggesting that Coates’ book "The Message," which is harshly critical of Israel and has been rebuked by the Jewish state's defenders, would "not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist."
CBS leadership insisted the interview did not meet "editorial standards," but Paramount Global chair Shari Redstone defended Dokoupil after he was reprimanded internally.
"I think Tony did a great job with that interview. I think he handled himself and showed the world and modeled what civil discourse is. He showed that there was accountability, that there is a system of checks and balances, and frankly, I was very proud of the work that he did," Redstone said during a panel in New York, according to the Washington Post.
MSNBC STARS SHOOT INSIDE THE TENT, ATTACK NBC FOR HIRING EX-RNC CHAIR RONNA MCDANIEL: ‘INEXPLICABLE’
In 2023, CNN staffers, including anchor Christiane Amanpour, publicly scolded their boss, then-CNN CEO Chris Licht, for giving a primetime town hall event to President Donald Trump when he was running for office again. Many CNN staffers didn’t feel Trump deserved a platform on the network, and Licht was never able to regain the faith of his workforce before getting fired that summer.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck said Americans have shown their displeasure with the far-left worldview at the ballot box but "these liberal partisans" still think they’re in charge.
"The inmates still believe they have some divine mandate to control what their audiences are force-fed and supposed to believe. It's also likely there's still at least a few who are deathly terrified of their far-left base," Houck told Fox News Digital.
"For all the talk in the liberal media that Republicans are scared of their right flanks, liberal journalists and their editorial bosses certainly feel at least warm to mildly hot when a BlueSky mob or other keyboard warrior groundswell in the comments section comes to the forefront," Houck continued. "It's maddening and no way any serious person runs a company, especially outside the political realm."
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Fox News Digital’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.