On the heels of massive Disney layoffs, another of the woke House of Mouse’s ventures shocked employees and viewers alike when it unexpectedly and seismically reduced its own workforce.
ABC News joined its parent company Disney in releasing C-suite personnel and firing several key executives, shaking up its newsroom and production teams.
“Throughout the company, teams are being impacted by the downsizing that was announced several weeks ago, including our own ABC News family,” ABC News President Kim Godwin told staffers in a just-released memo.
“While these actions are never easy,” Godwin’s memo added, “they are a necessary step to ensure we’re on solid footing for the years ahead as we chart a sustainable, growth-oriented path forward for the entire organization.”
CNN reported that several “senior vice president” positions were among those affected. Again, as with Disney’s firings, the people impacted were not just fringe diversity personnel or low-level employees; they were key leadership folks. CNN said, in part:
Among the staffers let go, according to people familiar with the matter, were senior vice president of newsgathering Wendy Fisher; senior vice president of talent Galen Gordon; vice president of talent Mary Noonan; Los Angeles bureau chief David Herndon; vice president of communications Alison Rudnick; senior executive producer Chris Vlasto; and executive editorial producer Heather Riley.
“While this is a difficult time for all of us – particularly those directly affected by these tough decisions – it’s important to remember that together, we are resilient, and will emerge from this period of transition stronger than before,” Godwin’s memo continued.
“In the coming days and weeks, we will share additional information about these teams and our plans,” she said.
Disney CEO Bog Iger, who returned to the helm after Bob Chapek was chased out of town for his own massive failures, has in recent weeks announced that Disney expects to shed some 7,000 jobs in order to save the struggling company over $5 billion.
And Disney and ABC aren’t the only woke workplaces seeing huge layoffs. NPR is as well, laying off about 100 employees and rolling back the number of podcasts it hosts. Predictably, NPR’s woke employees started throwing out allegations of “racism” and “transphobia,” as Bloomberg reports, saying:
Among the requests: employees wanted to see more specific breakdowns around the number or percentage of employees of different races and identities who were laid off, rather than those of the remaining employees.
[…]But the already tense environment boiled over during an exchange between CEO Lansing and a laid-off Black employee. That employee voiced concern that some podcasts hadn’t received marketing support and wondered how a show could gain audience without it. This person also listed executives’ names and repeated statements they had made in the past, asking for more accountability.
The individual then asked how NPR would make diversity work essential. Lansing replied that all the organization’s programming should be relevant to all of America — a stated mission for NPR.
[…]They immediately took to Zoom and called Lansing’s response “racist” and out-of-line. Another staff member dropped a link to a segment from NPR’s Code Switch titled, “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.”
“Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful,” one person wrote, according to screenshots of the chat viewed by Bloomberg.
“This meeting has made me more afraid for the future of public media than any conversation I have had in a very long time,” wrote another.
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