RUSH: The problems at ESPN continue. Last April they let go 100 people. That was after they laid off 5% of the workforce in 2015. But the bloodletting wasn’t over.
ESPN is now terminating another 100 people. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the ESPN layoffs will hit employees in a number of divisions and includes some on-air talent and executives.
The downtrend includes their subscriber base, too. In September, at the beginning of football season, ESPN reportedly lost nearly 7,000 subscribers a day.
Over the course of a month, they lost over 200,000 households. They’ve lost over 12 million subscribers in just the last five years. They now have the lowest number in a decade.
ESPN’s management hasn’t figured out why this is happening. They say it’s cord-cutting, but they don’t explain why cords are being cut.
Now, it can’t possibly be the amount of time ESPN spent delving into politics from a left-wing perspective, could it? Or it couldn’t be the anti-Trump rants from some of their sports commentators? Or the short shrift given to actually covering sports? No, there’s no way that could that upset subscribers who tune in for news about sports.
I guess the problems at ESPN will just remain a great big mystery — an unsolved mystery — forever. Kind of like why CNN can’t figure out why nobody watches them.