Fake News Goes Bust: Liberal Propaganda Outlet ThinkProgress is Shutting Down for Good
Shane Trejo
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ThinkProgress, the beleaguered left-wing propaganda outlet, is officially closing its doors today after undergoing serious financial trouble over the past several years.
A project of the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a Washington D.C. think-tank founded by Clinton insider and suspected pizza partier John Podesta – it will close as they were unable to find a publisher to run the site or a donor willing to pony up the funds to keep it operational despite its growing revenue losses.
“Given that we could find no new publisher, we have no other real option but to fold the ThinkProgress website back into CAP’s broader online presence with a focus on analysis of policy, politics, and news events through the lens of existing CAP and CAP Action staff experts,” said Navin Nayak, who works as executive director for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
“Conversations on how to do so are just beginning, but we will seek to reinvent it as a different platform for progressive change,” he added.
The last remaining dozen employees for ThinkProgress are being fired, and given severance packages that last until November. The organization’s journalists had unionized back in 2015, thinking it would help them receive better benefits and working conditions at the organization, but that scheme clearly backfired on them.
Just a few months ago, Big League Politics reported on a staff revolt at ThinkProgress after they announced projected losses of $3 million in revenue for 2019. Since its peak during the Obama administration, ThinkProgress has sunk like a stone.
“Unfortunately, ThinkProgress has had a large and growing budget gap for going on two years now,” Nayak said in June.
While ThinkProgress was never a money maker, it was worth keeping around for Democratic Party insiders due to its relevance and its ability to effectively discern left-wing propaganda. No longer an effective vehicle to do so, the media operation will be shuttered and the site will be changed into a glorified blog for CAP scholars.
“Like most media organizations, ThinkProgress has relied on advertising revenue as a major source of funding, increasingly subject to the behavior of social-media platforms and their decisions on news distribution. As with many other digital media organizations, 2017 and 2018 were particularly challenging years in this regard, as ThinkProgress experienced a 40 percent drop in ad revenue over just one year, creating an inevitable budgetary strain,” Nayak added.
This is the latest instance of fake news hacks getting the ax as the market share for their propaganda dries up in the digital age. Over 3,100 media professionals have lost their jobs in this year alone, as entities like Vice Media, Buzzfeed, and HuffPo struggle to remain afloat.
“Learn to code” was once considered a taunt to these obsolescent scribblers, but it may be practical advice to journalists who are not likely to hang onto their phony baloney jobs for very much longer.
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