According to Deadline, 14 percent of the staff was laid off on WB’s streaming service, HBO Max. Those laid off include a lot of VPs:
Overall, 14% of staff — about 70 people — are being laid off Monday, the vast majority of them on the Max side. That includes in Max Non-Fiction Originals, International, Acquisitions, Casting and previously reported Live-Action Family Originals, which are all being either scaled back significantly or essentially eliminated, leading to the departure of the bulk of the the staffs, led by Jennifer O’Connell EVP, Non-Fiction & Live-Action Family Originals for HBO Max; Jennifer Kim, SVP, International Originals for HBO Max; Michael Quigley, EVP of Content Acquisitions at HBO Max; and Linda Lowy, EVP Casting for WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, TNT, TBS and truTV.
Some of these people who were laid off* were pretty loyal to radical leftism and woke culture, and naturally, the firings are being painted with racist intent.
The Daily Beast interviewed some of these former HBO Max execs and some were more than happy to say that now the staff at the streaming service is whiter than ever:
The layoffs have “amplified the lack of diversity at HBO,” another former executive told The Daily Beast. “HBO is the most homogenous part of this umbrella. Instead of trying to figure out how to integrate some of the [Max] executives into HBO, they just made this sweeping cut of three divisions: kids, family, and international. A lot of Black and brown people lost their jobs.”
However, one former exec gave the game away when they snidely derided the new direction as being one that doesn’t want to divide people based on politics and, instead, embraces middle America:
One former exec describes Discovery+ as a “more general audience platform that doesn’t have the specificity that HBO Max was tailored to. I think Discovery is just a very ‘all’ audience, [they] don’t wanna make things that are political, topical, alienate Middle America—more Chip and Joanna**,” they said, referring to the home renovation show Fixer Upper: Welcome Home hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.
“If David Zaslav had his wish, he would just program Chip and Joanna all day long,” the executive said. “There was just a massive, ‘We don’t need you. You’re not offering the things we’re focused on.’”
Oh no! Warner Bros. is stepping away from divisive politics and embracing content that pleases general audiences instead of pushing a message that only a very small group of people actually cares about. Better get the torches and pitchforks.
There’s a simple principle that has been proven true time and time again, and with few exceptions: Get woke, go broke.
* Will the laid off employees be learning to code, or building solar panels?
Flashback to an earlier Zaslav cut:
** Interesting reference if you’re claiming that the Warner empire is whiter than ever: Gaines’ “mother was Korean and her father was half German and half Lebanese.”