Conservative outlet RedState fired most of its staff Friday while its owner, Salem Media, froze the site, citing an inability to "no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors."



"The site name will linger, but RedState is all but dead now. I have invited the fired writers here," Erick Erickson, a RedState founder who left the site in 2015, wrote in a blog post.

Fired staffers said the cuts focused on writers who have been critical of President Trump Donald John TrumpTrump awards Medal of Valor, civilian honors to responders in Dayton and El Paso shootings Texas Democrats unveil 'path to victory' plan for 2020 The Hill's 12:30 Report: Congress returns with gun violence, funding atop agenda MORE. RedState had often distinguished itself since 2016 as a home for Trump critics within the GOP.



RedState staffers were reportedly locked out of their accounts on a temporary or permanent basis, depending on job status, while the firings were being carried out.



Patrick Frey, a RedState blogger who goes by the name of "Patterico" online, wrote on Twitter that "those let go are all Trump critics" while "his supporters remain."

The rumors are true. There has been a mass firing at RedState, and those let go (including me) are all Trump critics. His supporters remain. — Patterico (@Patterico) April 27, 2018

Erickson also echoed Frey's sentiment in his Friday blog post, stating the dividing line was drawn between supporters of the president while "those insufficiently loyal to the President were fired."



"My understanding from the writers is that there were two contracts, one more expensive than the other. Most of those on the expensive contracts were tossed, though some very good ones will stay," wrote Erickson, himself a critic of the president.



"Of those under the cheaper contracts, it seems the dividing line was loyalty to the President. In fact, among those under the expensive contracts, I'm aware of some writers having near equal traffic generation, and those insufficiently loyal to the President were fired," he added.



A memo to staff obtained by CNN by a general manager of Salem-owned Townhall.com confirmed the "tough changes" made at RedState.



"We had to make some tough changes to RedState today," wrote Townhall general manager Jonathan Garthwaite in an internal memo. "While these changes are painful, they were necessary once we reached the conclusion that we could no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors."



The Hill has reached out to Salem Media for comment.</s>Right-wing outlet RedState has been frozen, and many of its most anti-President Donald Trump voices were fired after the site’s owner, Salem Media Group, alleged that it could “no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors."

Many of the site's writers were reportedly locked out of their RedState accounts without warning. And while some writers are in limbo status but have not yet been fired, others were caught by surprise and left wondering if the decision had anything to do with how critical they are of the president.

Erick Erickson, one of the site’s founders, said that “RedState is all but dead now” after these firings. He left RedState in 2015, so he was not involved in the mass firing.

“I have invited the fired writers here," he wrote.

"My understanding from the writers is that there were two contracts, one more expensive than the other. Most of those on the expensive contracts were tossed, though some very good ones will stay," he added. "Of those under the cheaper contracts, it seems the dividing line was loyalty to the President. In fact, among those under the expensive contracts, I'm aware of some writers having near equal traffic generation, and those insufficiently loyal to the President were fired.”

According to The Hill, the site had often given anti-Trump conservatives a voice.

CNN released the memo put together by a general manager of Townhall.com, which is also owned by Salem, confirming that the site was going through changes.

"We had to make some tough changes to RedState today," wrote Townhall general manager Jonathan Garthwaite. "While these changes are painful, they were necessary once we reached the conclusion that we could no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors."

On Twitter, many former RedState writers confirmed they had been kicked out. Others said they were uncertain of the future.

Other conservative personalities felt sorry that the site had acted this way, while many other online users simply mocked conservatives for being hypocritical regarding free speech.

If this mass firing was, indeed, associated with the writers’ unwillingness to pretend to like Trump, it’s going to be hard for conservatives themselves to see the RedState website as a credible outlet again.

In no time, the site may lose a significant amount of its audience. And, ironically, it’s all going to be thanks Trump.</s>Salem Media, owner of the influential conservative outlet RedState, froze the site on Friday and dismissed many of its writers.

Bloggers were locked out of their accounts — some just temporarily, while the cuts were made, and others permanently.

Erick Erickson, the site’s longtime editor who left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the “mass firing” on Friday morning.

“Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem’s direction,” he wrote. “And, finally, after all these years, they’ve turned off my account.”

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.

“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

But if it was about politics, it was also about money.

Related: Trump’s call to ‘Fox and Friends’ explains why we don’t hear much from him

RedState writers work on contract and are paid based on the amount of traffic to their posts.

“Those who had been under a contract with a higher per-click rate were mostly all tossed, only keeping those who were pro-Trump even if their traffic was comparable,” another one of the sources said on condition of anonymity.

“Of those who make less under their contracts, they mostly tossed those who had been openly critical of the president,” the source said. “It seems to have been a cost saving measure, but the deciding factor between any two people seems to have been who liked the president and who didn’t.”

Salem had no immediate comment. But an internal memo obtained by CNNMoney confirmed the housecleaning.

“We had to make some tough changes to RedState today,” Townhall general manager Jonathan Garthwaite wrote in the memo. “While these changes are painful, they were necessary once we reached the conclusion that we could no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors.”

RedState, a 13-year-old blog that was founded by Erick Erickson, is one of several sites in Townhall Media’s portfolio. Townhall, in turn, is owned by Salem Media Group, a conservative media company that also operates radio stations and publishes books.

Salem has previously been scrutinized for its treatment of radio hosts who weren’t toeing a pro-Trump line during the presidential campaign.

A source with ties to RedState said bloggers had been “wondering if this was going to happen at RedState,” meaning “anyone who wasn’t a big fan of Trump would be dumped.”

RedState has been reflective of the divides within the GOP and the conservative movement, with a spectrum of writers with varying reactions to Trump’s political choices and personality conflicts.

Garthwaite did not respond to a followup request for comment on Friday.

His initial email to writers said, “there’s no getting around the fact that this is awful news, but I value your contribution to RedState and I hope you will stick with it through this tough period and keep RedState going.”

However, some contributors then received a separate email indicating that they were out. Their accounts were locked, meaning publishing rights were revoked.

Caleb Howe, one of the site’s lead editors, was among those dismissed.

He cryptically tweeted on Friday, “There is a right way to do something and a f—ed up way.”

His tweet aimed at an unknown person, saying, “You can call me back or you can watch this unfold right here, guy.”

Howe did not respond to requests for comment from CNNMoney.</s>Salem Media, owner of the influential conservative outlet RedState, froze the site on Friday and dismissed many of its writers.

Bloggers were locked out of their accounts — some just temporarily, while the cuts were made, and others permanently.

Erick Erickson, who founded the site 13 years ago, and left in 2015, tweeted about what he called the “mass firing” on Friday morning.

“Very sad to see, but not really surprising given Salem’s direction,” he wrote. “And, finally, after all these years, they’ve turned off my account.”

Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.

“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.

“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”

But if it was about politics, it was also about money.</s>RedState was a rare thing these days in the conservative media: a platform for an array of different opinions about President Trump. That now seems to be a thing of the past, as media on the right has split into two camps: the full-on Trump boosterism of Breitbart or Fox News’s opinion programs, or anti-Trump critique as exemplified by National Review. On Friday, several contract writers were let go from the conservative website RedState and its editor, Caleb Howe, was fired. One thing many of them had in common was their vocal criticism of Trump. Howe got the news while driving from his home in North Carolina to Washington to meet with Townhall Media, the arm of Salem Media which owns RedState, about Facebook strategy. Jonathan Garthwaite, the vice president and general manager of Townhall Media, called him before he got to the meeting and fired him over the phone, Howe told me. Garthwaite did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

I spoke to Howe while he was still in his car in D.C. He said that around 10 writers had been let go, and their contracts (which pay writers based on the number of times their articles are viewed) terminated. “The site has been doing well. I don’t think there’s any reason to panic or that they would need a sudden and instantaneous change to how things are done,” Howe said. The site had drawn roughly 7 or 8 million pageviews each month, according to Howe, down from 10 or 12 million a month during the election. Dips in audience after elections are common throughout the digital media. Howe said that even the impact of Facebook’s algorithm change, which conservative publishers have blamed for a decline in traffic, was relatively moderate: “We took a relatively small traffic hit from the new Facebook guidelines,” he said. His brother, the conservative writer Ben Howe, passed along the email he had received from Garthwaite cutting him loose. The email suggests that the cuts were made for financial reasons. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers,” Garthwaite wrote. “Therefore, effective today, we are terminating our independent contractor agreement with you with your writing responsibilities ending immediately. This is a 30-day notice of the end of our compensation payments to you. You will be paid for April 2018 in the normal manner. At the end of May, we will tabulate the total page views that accumulated during May for content written prior to April 28th and you will be paid for May 2018 page views based upon those reports.” (Garthwaite did not respond to a request for comment.)

But sources I spoke with were skeptical of that explanation. “I think the ones who were shitcanned—and this is just my opinion—could probably be easily defined as the loudest and most vocal Trump critics,” Ben Howe said. “There’s a clear pattern that the people who were let go were all critics of Donald Trump,” said Patrick Frey, a lawyer who blogs as Patterico and whose contract was also terminated on Friday. “It was a complete surprise,” Frey said. “There’d been rumors of contract changes but being fired was a complete surprise.” Jay Caruso, a former RedState editor, now works for The Dallas Morning News but maintained a contract with the site until Friday morning. “When you look at he names across the board, the people that were let go had a clear bias against President Trump,” he said. Caleb Howe pointed out that RedState is keeping some Trump-critical writers. But he emphasized that one of those fired was Susan Wright, an anti-Trump writer who, he said, had consistently been one of the highest-trafficked writers on the site. “The most Trump-critical people, the most vocally critical were on the list, especially Susan Wright,” he said. “Susan also happens to be the number one traffic draw at RedState, so it’s sort of weird if it’s a monetary decision.” “Over the last two years I’ve been working for them, I’ve consistently been one of their top three writers,” Wright told me. “More often than not their top writer … They can’t say it’s a money issue.” She tried to file a piece on Friday morning, and found herself locked out of the system. She then received an email from Garthwaite nearly identical to the one Ben Howe received.

In the modern conservative media, is there an audience for RedState’s mix of views? Or is it bad for business to not choose a side? “If nothing else, this shows you how deep, how solid that wall is down through the Republican Party, the conservative movement, what happened when Trump got introduced into the bloodstream,” Wright said. “Partisans on one side, conservatives on the other side.” The Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year showed the extent to which Trump has overwhelmed the conservative movement. His ascendancy has either marginalized movement conservatives or co-opted them, remaking their worldview in his image. RedState, which was founded in 2004, now seems a relic from a time when Tea Party activism propelled a new set of writers into the conservative media, blessed with a certain freedom in being in the opposition to the party in power. It’s not that there weren’t intra-party and intra-movement fights; there were. But the fighting over Mitt Romney pales in comparison to the savage infighting caused by the rise of Trump. Before Howe, the site was led by Erick Erickson and then Leon Wolf, both now vocal critics of Trump. Erickson wrote on his website on Friday that he had felt even before the firings that RedState was in decline. “They've really stopped driving a conversation among conservatives in the past few years as they turned to clickbait and now will really just be a clickbait site it seems,” he wrote.

“One of the things I was always really proud of at the website was that it’s representative of the current schism in the Republican movement,” Caleb Howe said. “RedState gained and retained traffic in a way that many conservative blogs were not able to, and we survived the slaughter of the Trump years and the slaughter of being anti-Trump,” Howe said. “We kept never-Trumpers on the front page, like Susan Wright, all the way up until this week, successfully.” Frey says he’s grateful for his time at RedState and emphasized that the company has the right to fire people. But he worried that the remaining writers were being sent a clear message about what kind of views were now permissible. “It seems like the message of the firings is very clear,” he said. “We won’t tolerate strong criticism of this president.” “What this says is ‘Toe this line,’ and it’s not behind a movement, it’s behind a man,” Wright said. Though it’s not yet clear what will become of RedState, Caleb Howe said his impression is that management will not install a new editor to replace him, instead turning the site into a Twitchy-style network. “RedState as an independent editorial point of view will no longer exist. It will now be subject to the editorial control of Townhall,” he said.</s>In a tweetstorm that stretched more than six hours Wednesday, West upended traditional partisan media stances, if only for a day. And all he had to do was say some nice things about President Donald Trump and wear a MAGA hat.

West has been public about his support for Trump stretching back to 2016. He said at a concert in November of that year that he didn't vote but would have backed Trump if he did.

And the following month, he met with the then-President-elect at Trump Tower. But the reaction to West's tweets, in which he called Trump his "brother" with whom he shares "dragon energy," was different, in part because Trump himself weighed in, retweeting two of them.

The coverage of the tweets Wednesday on the right was glowing. West led the Drudge Report, Sean Hannity called it "a new political landscape in America," and Breitbart posted 11 photos about West's tweets and other related ones on Instagram in 24 hours. One by one, Fox News hosts read the words "dragon energy" as his tweets were displayed on screen through the evening. It echoed conservative media's response to the first episode of "Roseanne," a celebration of the rare Trump supporter in mainstream pop culture. " Shut up and dribble ," this was not.

West isn't a typical conservative hero. He famously went off-script in 2005 during a nationally televised Hurricane Katrina fundraiser and said then-President George W. Bush "doesn't care about black people." He attended March For Our Lives . As he himself tweeted, he doesn't consider himself Republican, he doesn't agree with "everything Trump does," and he loves Hillary Clinton too. And some of his lyrics are explicit, the type that could have ended up in a Laura Ingraham segment about how rap is anti-women. So West's quick embrace by conservative media suggests its dismissal of celebrity political opinions as disingenuous, applicable only when the said celebrity is liberal. It was the former reality TV star Trump who boasted he didn't need J.Lo or Jay-Z to attract a crowd during the campaign , and who tweeted he wanted people and not celebrities to attend his inauguration. In actuality, Trump has had trouble attracting famous supporters. But when they come, both he and conservative media are happy to have them. "Very cool," he tweeted Wednesday.</s>Kanye West declares his support for President Donald Trump on social media -- and rapper Meek Mill is out of prison but he says he doesn't feel free. Casey Carver with TMZ joins FOX6 WakeUp with the scoop.
Conservative media site RedState fires most of its staff and its owner Salem Media Group freezes the site, stating they could "no longer support the entire roster of writers and editors". Staff claim they were fired for their opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump.