Last night, members of The Hill Guild learned through an article in Semafor that The Hill sacrificed one of our members to satisfy Trump.
That’s not an exaggeration, and you can read the reporting by Max Tani. He shows how Trump sued 20 newspapers for reporting that his Truth Social platform was losing money.
All those papers are fighting him in court — except The Hill, which is run by Nexstar. Which is also, as Semafor’s reporting found, run by Trump’s former business partners, and which needs some very specific things from his Federal Communications Commission.
They fired one of our colleagues to make the lawsuit go away.
To say we are disappointed is an understatement. Each person at The Hill is invaluable — and Breaking News reporters have to work at a relentless pace. A multi-billion dollar company throwing one of its lowest-paid employees under the bus is indefensible.
And that’s not all. In addition to folding under Trump, Tani’s reporting confirmed what we have long suspected: Nexstar is on a path to completely alter The Hill’s editorial standards.
He also records Nexstar’s network president — and Trump’s former producer — saying during a closed-door meeting that impending layoffs at The Hill would eliminate “losers” from our newsroom, which he thinks is a little too “similar to the HuffPost.”
No one at The Hill, a longtime leader in unbiased political journalism, is expendable, and not a single person in this newsroom is, to use Sean Compton’s words, a “loser.”
We strongly condemn The Hill and Nexstar management’s pursuit of layoffs, which would affect roughly 30 percent of our staff. We also reject the company’s plan to cut critical reporting beats and personnel.
The Hill is built on a foundation of nonpartisanship. We’re fighting to keep it that way.
Sign our petition here to demand no layoffs and a fair contract!