Ben Shapiro has announced that his conservative outlet, the Daily Wire, cut 13 percent of staff this year, following reports that his media empire was “collapsing.”
Shapiro called the layoffs “truly sad” in a video clip from his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, released on social media Friday.
After reports from The Washington Post and New York Magazine’s Intelligencer about sizable layoffs at the Daily Wire, Shapiro admitted, “It’s true.”
“The Daily Wire laid off some 13 percent of our workforce since the beginning of the year. And that really sucked. It was truly sad because all those people are great,” he said.
Shapiro said he is personally helping as many of his laid-off workers find new jobs as he can “because everybody who we let go deserves a job somewhere else. They’re great folks.”
The Daily Wire was co-founded by Shapiro in 2015. The outlet describes itself as “opinionated” and “noisy.”
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Shapiro’s critics believe the Daily Wire’s “relevance to the right has irrevocably collapsed.”
Daily Wire spokesman Brad Bishop told The Washington Post that the company still has more than 200 employees and that most of the layoffs mainly occurred at its headquarters in Nashville.
Intelligencer then published a piece called “Why Ben Shapiro’s Media Empire Is Collapsing” on Thursday, which noted the Daily Wire’s website has become “one of the great traffic losers in conservative media.”
Shapiro defended his outlet’s popularity, noting in Friday’s video that DailyWire+ is ranked sixth on Podtrac’s top global podcast chart with more than 41 million streams, downloads and views as of April. The Daily Wire is one of Podtrac’s supporters.
At the center of both reports on the layoffs are claims that the outlet’s traditional conservatism no longer aligns with other members of the right.
“Ben Shapiro has become the avatar of a strand of conservatism that has been taking it on the chin for years,” Nicole Hemmer, a conservative-media historian at Vanderbilt University, told The Washington Post.
“And they are now losing favor within the conservative movement, which is as much a problem for [President Donald] Trump as it is for Ben Shapiro,” Hemmer added.
Shapiro claimed in his video that “the media left and the woke right…they are attempting to destroy traditional conservatism.”
The Daily Wire co-founder wrote on social media alongside his video, “All the haters can kiss my a**.”
The Independent reached out to the Daily Wire for comment, which referred to Shapiro’s podcast clip.
