State Department Layoffs: Oh, The Theatrics.
It’s richly ironic.
Journalists didn’t film, report on and cry for the thousands of Americans who lost their manufacturing or coal industry jobs. Shoot, they hardly noticed when it was their own colleagues being tossed on the streets.
But they were out in full force Friday with their cameras and notebooks, trying to gin up sympathy for a handful of State Department workers who got pink slips.
Here’s a fact they seem to have forgotten: During the past two decades, as newspapers went from being primary sources of news and information to irrelevant pamphlets peppered with day-old announcements, tens of thousands of journalists lost their jobs.
At the newspaper where I last worked there was wave after wave of layoffs beginning, I believe in 2008, until the once-energetic, award-winning paper lost its senior staff, its building, its historical knowledge and finally, its importance to the community.
Still, I don’t remember Reuters, CNN, The New York Times - or any outlet - writing sob stories about our employees being tossed onto the sidewalk. No heart-rending videos of reporters carrying cardboard boxes of their desk detritus to their cars. No sad pictures of co-workers hugging each other, knowing they were part of the new journalistic diaspora.
Yet last week’s layoffs of just 1,300 State Department employees caused widespread gnashing of teeth in the media and elsewhere as videos of the bawling former employees went viral.
Clap lines, tears and snotty notes left behind in crayon.
Yeeeesh.
Get a grip, folks. State employees about 80,000 people. The lay-offs involved just 2% of the workforce.
So theatrical.
Back when my employer was busy tossing employees like ballast on a sinking ship, I didn’t read a single tearjerker about the excellent copy editor in Norfolk who’d worked at the paper for 40 years, had just been diagnosed with cancer and begged the brass to let her keep her job.
She was told to hit the road.
THAT would have made a terrific feature about the cruel heartlessness of newspaper execs when faced with revenue shortfalls.
Then again, they couldn’t blame Trump for her misery so what was the point?
Learn to code, they said.
And we did, figuratively speaking.
Here are some numbers for you. They come from both the Pew Research Center and the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Since 2000, there has been a drop of 65% in overall newspaper employment. Most of those job losses came between 2008 and 2020 when newspaper employment fell 57%.
More alarmingly for those who - like us - live outside the big metro areas in the U.S. there has been a 75% loss in local journalists.
Today 1 in 5 newspaper employees live in New York City, Los Angeles or Washington D.C., yet only 13% of all American workers live in those areas.
In case you’ve ever wondered why the media seems so out of touch with ordinary decent people.
Close to 200,000 newspaper jobs that existed in 2000 are now gone. Forever. And 2,200 local newspapers have closed since 2005.
What am I saying here? Losing a job is tough. It wreaks havoc on families and marriages, finances and can cause mental anguish equivalent to losing a spouse.
Yet they happen frequently in a free-market economy.
On Joe Biden’s first day in office he cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline, throwing 11,000 workers out of their jobs. How many sob stories did you see about those workers?
Later, Biden merrily fired American military members who refused to take the experimental covid vaccine.
Not only didn’t the legacy media weep for those unemployed warriors, they shamed the “vaccine hesitant” and said the unvaccinated should be denied healthcare if they became sick. Some wanted the unvaxxed confined to their homes.
Consider this: In May of this year, Microsoft laid off 6,000 workers and the tech company just announced that another 9,000 layoffs are coming. That’s a magnitude greater than the State Department layoffs of 1,300 workers that took effect this week, that made headlines in the corporate news industry.
The federal government is not a jobs program, even though some treat it as such.
Turns out government work - which ironically often pays better than private sector employment - is not immune from cutbacks and efficiency when the national debt is in the trillions.
I am truly sorry for all the federal workers who were photographed clutching their cardboard boxes and posing for teary goodbye photos last week.
Many of us have been there.
The difference? The legacy media didn’t swoop in to portray our departures as anything more than routine balance-sheet disruptions.
Then again, there was no way to blame Donald Trump for OUR job losses.
