Blue state lock downs are also damaging their media base

Thomas Lifson:

The nation's blue-state governors seem to be far more enthusiastic about lockdowns than their red-state counterparts, perhaps because they recognize that the small businesses being driven toward extinction are a key component of the GOP base.  But if their motives are so ruthless, perhaps they need to reckon with the damage being done to the key propaganda organs of the left: progressive media, higher education, and government schools.

Waves of layoffs already have hit such progressive stalwarts as Vice, Quartz, BuzzFeed, and Conde Nast.  Now The Atlantic, controlled by Steve Jobs's widow and previously recruiting highly paid talent, is joining the layoff crowd.  (In fairness, conservative media, including American Thinker, have also been hard hit by the catastrophic decline in advertising revenue, but we are roughly 10% of the media landscape at most, so most of the toll comes at the expense of the left.)

Higher education — almost totally dominated by the left — is, if anything, even harder hit.  Having driven up tuition at a rate of three times inflation for half a century, colleges and universities are now forced to rely on remote learning, and parents are chafing at paying 30, 40, 50, or more thousand dollars a year for online studies that can be had for free or low tuition elsewhere.  Colleges are scared stiff that fewer students will show up in the fall, if they even open their campuses.  Meanwhile, salary and other fixed expenses are difficult or impossible to cut.  Internal strife is rocking campuses whose leaders are attempting to make cuts to faculty costs.

One of the very few colleges to reopen, Liberty University, is not part of the progressive cabal, but for the rest of the leftist educational swamp, solidarity with the blue-state panic crowd is important.

Meanwhile, the closing of government schools has forced homeschooling on parents, and while many are not up to the task and are longing for the daycare function of public education to return, other parents are discovering that online learning from home may have unsuspected virtues.  This poll has got to chill teacher unions and well-paid school bureaucrats:

A RealClear Opinion Research survey of 2,122 registered voters shows that support for educational choice is strong, and that a significant portion of parents are more likely to pursue homeschooling opportunities after the lockdowns end. The results show that 40% of families are more likely to homeschool or virtual school after lockdowns, and that 64% support school choice and 69% support the federal Education Freedom Scholarships proposal

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There is more.

The media appears to be self destructing along with the education establishment.  I have never seen so many leftist so oblivious to their own demise.  It is like a suicide cult.