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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25841 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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https://nypost.com/2024/01/19/sports/sports-illustrateds-entire-staff-told-they-are-getting-laid-off/

Sports Illustrated is no more.

The future of Sports Illustrated looked dire Friday after the publisher of the diminished outlet announced mass layoffs because its license to use the iconic brand’s name in print and digital was revoked.

“Yesterday, The Arena Group’s license to serve as the publisher of Sports Illustrated was terminated as a result of the company’s failure to pay its quarterly license fee despite being given a notice of breach and an opportunity to cure the breach,” the company said in a statement provided to The Post. “Authentic is here to ensure that the brand of Sports Illustrated, which includes its editorial arm, continues to thrive as it has for the past nearly 70 years. We are confident that going forward the brand will continue to evolve and grow in a way that serves sports news readers, sports fans, and consumers.

Now go woke, go broke is a simple and shadenfraude explanation, but I don't think it tells the full story. And with recent full wokeness on the swimsuit edition - well I doubt that it endeared the core audience more. And this year is already full with disney flops and victoria's secret epiphany that people like hot women.

Media in US is in trouble. While I hold the opinion that wokeness hastened their demise, probably it was inevitable. And the US journalistic class has a monoculture problem. There was obviously no one that knew how to run a media property targeted towards red bloodied males. To write films in Disney that are alluring to non CRT degree holding single women.

We are in a money is tight period - and the people that hold the reigns of the biggest media conglomerates have no idea how to sell to huge part of the audience.

We are in a money is tight period - and the people that hold the reigns of the biggest media conglomerates have no idea how to sell to huge part of the audience.

It's more than that. They don't WANT to sell to that part of the audience. Provided they can keep anyone else from picking it up, they're happy to leave all that dirty money on the table.

The nature hates money on the table. Someone will eventually get them.

I think @The_Nybbler has the right of this one. Are you familiar with the Rural Purge in 1970s television?

By 1966, industry executives were lamenting the lack of diversity in American television offerings and the dominance of rural-oriented programming on the Big Three television networks of the era, noting that "ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies".[4]

CBS vice president Michael Dann personally hated the rural-oriented programming he was airing (as did most television executives), but he kept the shows on the air in acknowledgement of their strong overall ratings, which he considered the most important measure of a program's success. Dann's superior, CBS president James T. Aubrey, likewise believed rural sitcoms were a crucial part of the network's formula for success, noting that at the time, advertisers wanted the audience that watched rural sitcoms.[5] Robert Wood, an incoming president of CBS, pressured Dann to cancel the rural programs. Dann was forced out shortly after his response to Wood: "Just because the people who buy refrigerators are between 26 and 35 and live in Scarsdale, you should not beam your programming only at them."[6]

All three of the major television networks, but especially CBS, cancelled popular, highly profitable programs for ideological and aesthetic reasons, and their oligarchical grasp on TV programming at the time meant that no one else was able to pick up the money they were leaving on the table.

But content production has much less oligarchical capture, these days.

True in some fields (sports writing, for example), less true in others. What non-woke group has the financial capacity and coordination ability to produce new worthwhile movies and TV shows? Who can compete with Disney, Netflix, or Amazon? No one, not even the Daily Wire, so when those companies choose to produce only woke content, consumers’ options are either consume that material, or consume nothing.*

*That is, nothing new, which doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people. If I chose to consume only public domain movies, books, music, etc., it would still take me multiple lifetimes to run out of new material.

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