Ben Shapiro has announced that his conservative outlet, the Daily Wire, cut 13 percent of staff this year.
Shapiro called the layoffs “truly sad” in a video clip from his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, released on social media Friday.
After a report about “significant” layoffs at the Daily Wire came out Thursday, 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.”
When New York Magazine’s Intelligencer reported on the layoffs Thursday, it noted the Daily Wire’s website has become “one of the great traffic losers in conservative media.”
Shapiro defended his outlet’s popularity, noting 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.
The Daily Wire was co-founded by Shapiro in 2015. The outlet describes itself as “opinionated” and “noisy.”
The Independent has reached out to the Daily Wire for comment.
This is a developing story…