Longtime film critic Rex Reed, who’s been at this racket since the ’60s, has been iced by the New York Observer. Not out of any apparent malice but due to the paper’s dwindling revenues, which have necessitated cutbacks. The Observer‘s top-dog movie critic since the early ’90s, Reed was told last week that he’s toast. In the same way that all steers and cows have a date with the slaughterhouse, all film critics eventually get the axe. Unless, that is, they’re running their own online column in which case they’re bulletproof as long as the ads roll in.

Reed told Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn that “the Observer has been going down the drain financially for quite some time”, or since investment banker Arthur Carter sold the rag to Jared Kushner in ’06. Kushner’s brother-in-law, Joseph Meyer, took control of the paper as Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump moved to Washington.

“The end of what was the remains of a once-vital and responsible New York paper came when [Kushner] threw what was left of a great weekly paper under the bus and lost all interest in bringing it back to life again,” Reed said, “by focusing his interests on running the White House and digging a tunnel to Russia.”