Corporate Media Giants Caught Protecting Union-Busters

Staffers at NBC and MSNBC walked off the job last week to protest the networks’ massive layoffs of employees. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Staffers at NBC and MSNBC walked off the job last week to protest the networks massive layoffs of employees. Okay. Now here's the problem I got with it, they laid off seven people. Okay. They laid off seven people. But they're out there on the street, oh my God, they've laid off. Here's, you know what I got real problems with? These people that are out there on the street protest, this, you know, protesting the seven people who lost their jobs. You try to get MSNBC or NBC to cover exactly what we just talked about, to cover what the, what the Amazon folks are having to go through, what Starbucks folks are, what the Walmart folks are having to go to. It's not, they won't cover it. You see, it's not important.

Yeah.

Because it's not them. And because, and oh, by the way, Walmart's the big advertiser. Starbucks is the big advertiser. You know, Amazon's the big advertiser, so they don't do those stories. But when they lose seven people, seven, seven employees. Oh my God. You'd think, you'd think that Democracy is at an end.

Yeah. Well, you know, NBC and MSNBC here really did do some underhanded stuff. Granted, it is a small number, but there's also possibly projected more coming because we're seeing it across the board. I mean, CNN is, they're almost dead as it is. Big tech is laying off thousands of people.

MSNBC's heading the same same way.

And so what they told these employees was, well, we didn't have to let the labor union know we were gonna start the layoffs because we decided that we're gonna take the business in a, a new direction. It's a new business strategy. So by reclassifying it as a strategy rather than a downsizing, they said, well, we don't have to tell you. We don't have to give you the benefits. We don't have to give you, you know, six weeks pay, or 90 days, however much it was that we had agreed to. So they really did screw these people over. And again, this is coming from the network that bills itself as we're, we're the left wing folks. You know, we are the, on the side of the labor unions and they're doing, and we, because we've talked about MSNBC strikes for years and the labor union busting happening there.

Farron, how often have you seen that network spend a minute talking about these lives that are affected by union busting that's going on everywhere across this country right now? That it's at an all time high, the effect of union busting. It's, it's been, it's been re-energized. You check out and see how many times MSNBC has done a story on that. How about never. You know, if you may.

Oh, well, not since, not since Ed Schultz left the network.

Yeah. Ed Schultz. That's right. He and I.

That was his big thing.

He and I, you know, I loved Ed Schultz. We used to have a show and he'd have me on three days a week sometimes talking about this very thing. And they ran him off because he was, you know, he was, he was speaking up where he wasn't supposed to speak up. He was saying, well, why aren't we doing more stories like that? Why are we catering to all of our advertisers to where we can't do meaningful stories? And so, I don't know. I look at this, I don't really care. I know you do, you do. I don't really care. I think there's some poetic justice here. And if seven people lost their jobs, they've got bigger issues they oughta be thinking about than those seven people. I hope they get their jobs back. I hope they work it out. But you know what, it's hard for me to, to feel sorry for MSNBC and, and NBC.