Want to know how you can tell when the lockdown became a new great depression? It’s when the media starts experiencing large layoffs. Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of media layoffs currently under way that makes for the feel good story of the week for sure.

The New York Times reports that “Roughly 33,000 workers at news companies in the U.S. have been laid off, been furloughed or had their pay reduced. Some publications that rely on ads have shut down.” And it seldom gets better than this:

NPR Warns of Major Cuts Due to Coronavirus NPR will be instituting severe cost-cutting measures as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Wednesday internal memo, with a budget deficit looming as high as $25 million through fiscal 2021. . .

I suppose this will just free up a lot of media people to volunteer full time for Democrats, though of course they’re doing that already, so how could we tell?

The mendacity and mediocrity of our major news media have seldom been on display more clearly than during the COVID-19 crisis. While the media pretend to be “objective” and are now clearly on the side of the Democrats’ narrative that Trump was negligent and slow in responding to the virus, there is plenty of evidence of the media downplaying the threat of the virus and criticizing Trump’s early moves, especially his China travel ban, which the media decried as “xenophobic.” And then there is the media’s lack of interest in the Tara Reade allegation about Joe Biden, which is so blatant that even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gets it.

But who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes? A few samples:

And then naturally the Huffington Post can’t help itself, because of the left’s Ahab fixation:

The White Male Is the Greatest Risk in Spreading the Virus By Richard Stokoe Covid-19 has found an ally in its pursuit of infecting as many people as possible in the shortest space of time — the older white man. . . This White Male Effect will also almost certainly have played a part in how slowly the UK and the US responded to the emerging pandemic. Both the Johnson and Trump administrations have also turned to older white male experts for how to manage this crisis. . . This White Male Effect is caused primarily by the education system and society as a whole, which encourages white men to believe in their own superiority.

That last line is what I believe journalists these days think is news.

Another lefty who actually gets close to understanding the problem is Bill Maher:

Maybe some day he’ll figure out the common denominator in what’s wrong with the media. (Hint for Bill: it’s leftism.)