Think Progress Union Threatens ‘Legal Options’ Against Center For American Progress After Site Closure
Instead of being used by the Center for American Progress think tank arm, the site will be archived
The left and their unions…
Last week, far left site Think Progress announced it would be closing up shop for good. Professor Jacobson blogged about the sites closure:
But back in the day, in the earlier years of Legal Insurrection, we wrote a lot about Think Progress and its efforts to smear the Tea Party as racist and violent. Think Progress led an obsessive campaign to demonize the Koch brothers and Andrew Breitbart. The false claim that Sarah Palin’s electoral map was connected to Jared Loughner’s shooting of Gabby Giffords was spread with the early help of Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias.
According to The Daily Beast, TP was running a budget deficit of $2.5 million, tried to find a publisher, failed to do so, and so the site was shut down. Remaining staff walked away with a sweet severance package and the Center for American Progress planned to use their own staff to publish think tank content on the defunct blog. The last bit rubbed the TP union the wrong way, union labor being replaced with non-union labor and whatnot. And so the legal threats began.
Thank you all so much for the outpouring of support. Please see below for our statement on CAP's decision to lay off our entire unionized newsroom. pic.twitter.com/cVFKbnvegJ
— ThinkProgress Union (@TP_Union) September 10, 2019
More from The Daily Beast:
The union that has represented workers at the site ThinkProgress said on Monday that it was exploring “legal options” against the site’s owner, the Center for American Progress (CAP), just days after it shut the progressive news outlet down.
“The Writers Guild secured an excellent severance package for our members that goes above the requirements of our collective bargaining agreement, but in light of new developments on the future of ThinkProgress, we are continuing conversations with CAP and exploring our legal options,” Jason Gordon, the director of communications for the Writers Guild of America, East, told The Daily Beast on Monday night.
Gordon would not go into further details. But his statement appears to have been prompted by concerns of remaining staff at ThinkProgress that the site would no longer function as an editorially independent arm of CAP but, instead, as a sounding board for scholars at the think tank. Ex-staffers noted that under the new system, the union workers who had populated thinkprogress.org with content would be replaced with non union workers; and that part of their actual union contract established editorial independence.
Within hours of Gordon issuing his statement, a spokesperson for CAP said it was shelving plans to keep the site running and would instead have it archived. The spokesperson also said that CAP would end the recurring donations feature for ThinkProgress supporters, which had also been a point of contention with union members, who believed that those donors should not have been required to opt out of giving their recurring donations.
So now Think Progress is really dead. Not just kind of dead.
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Comments
Wahts the Problem SOROS write them a check and like your ethics get this behind you.
Jesus told in Matthew 25 the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.
And when a dispute arose with the paymaster at the end of the day, the Landowner countered, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go your way. I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? Or is your eye evil because I am good?”
Private property. What a concept! But unions, by definition, undermine that very concept with their attempts to usurp power away from those invested in the business.
Oh I LOVE those last lines in their letter!!!
“But ThinkProgress was not founded to be profitable. We now know that this was never about money. This was always about power and control.”
DUUUUUUHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After all these years of you working on their side, you FINALLY figured that out??? Well Congratulations!!!! Maybe in another 20 years you’ll figure that’s all that ANY of the nonsense you’ve spent your lives spewing is about!!!!
This also demonstrated beautifully the effect of a union on an organization that Has No Money, and nobody who wants to pay their bills either. Not only do they kill it, they guarantee it stays dead and NO ONE can come up with any way to resurrect it.
Which in this case is mighty fine with me. I wanted this zombie site erased long ago.
learn to code, you journo majors!!!
Over on Inside Higher Education, a recent article about standards in humanities journals said that an emerging issue is computer-generated articles.
So they don’t want people to learn to code.
LMFAO! Learn to code, bitches!
The only legal recourse that comes to mind would be the WARN Act, but I think there have to be 45 or more employees before it kicks in.
Left on left cannibalism. I love it!
The truth is the left wing feeder site is another Soros/Brock collaboration called ShareBlue. Therefore these guys are now unnecessary. In fact, Professor Jacobson, I suggest you wander over to share blue so you can ridicule the talking point of the day…but don’t reveal where you got the info.
There’s no Freude like Schadenfreude – no Freude I know.
Not that I want to help CAP really … but they ought to reconsider that sweet severance package, if other issues really aren’t allowed to die. A deal’s a deal, unless it’s with a liberal.
Need to ask them why they are entitled to their jobs, but coal miners in West Virginia are not entitled to theirs?