The Dying Industry on Which Our System Lives

Ye olde fashioned newsroom. We will actually miss this when it’s gone.

I have some comments in the works on Donald Trump’s conviction on all counts in his New York hush money trial.

But before I get to that, I have a new article up at Discourse on the collapse of the news media. Not the collapse of the media in terms of its quality or its objectivity—those have been open to criticism for a very long time. I mean its collapse as a business and as a social institution.

The story behind many of the stories in today’s news is the collapse of the news media itself—a collapse that has been happening in slow motion for decades but has intensified recently…. A 2023 report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism found that journalism is dying at an accelerating rate.

Since 2005, the US has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. The nation is on pace to lose one-third of all its newspapers by the end of next year. There are about 6,000 newspapers remaining, the vast majority of which are weeklies.

The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists, or 43,000, during that same time. Most of those journalists were employed by large metro and regional newspapers.

We are trying to maintain a representative republic with only one-third the number of people who used to provide the information that informed voters.

Our entire system of government lives on the basis of a dying industry. A system of representative government depends on an informed citizenry, and this in turn depends on institutions that bring them reliable information. When those institutions collapse and radically shrink, we can’t expect our system of government to just go on functioning, and this is behind some of the current dysfunction you see in our system.

I propose several examples, including this one.

Conservatives used to complain about “low-information voters.” Well, the low-information voters have become even more dominant—and the irony is that they are now particularly dominant on the right. Another Pew poll from 2020 shows a gap between left and right, not just in what they read but in whether they read. Conservatives are more likely to get their news from Fox than from CNN. But they are even more likely to get it from cable TV than from reading—and that includes conservative publications.

This is one of the reasons Donald Trump managed to take control of the Republican Party despite being initially opposed en bloc by the conservative intelligentsia. The Republican base just isn’t reading the work of its intellectuals. These voters watch TV instead—and there was Trump, already a cultural celebrity and now plastered all over the cable news shows.

You can say that the old “mainstream media” was biased and deserves whatever happens to it. I wouldn’t, because for all its bias, I have always depended on the real reporting that is done by that media. The world is a big place, and a lot of things are happening in it. We need large institutions capable of reliably gathering and disseminating that information.

Moreover, the factors causing the collapse of the news media had nothing to do with its bias—as I indicate above, it has hit conservative media harder—and they are making partisan bias worse.

People are increasingly getting their news from social media platforms such as Facebook or the platform formerly known as Twitter. But social media tends to be segmented by preexisting partisan loyalties; the algorithms feed us what fits our biases. Social media also tends to be dominated by political obsessives and fanatics, who post far more content than regular people.

So instead of news presented in a balanced way to a wide audience, social media feeds us whatever entrenches and exaggerates our existing loyalties.

I couldn’t cram it into the article, but this has been one of the big disappointments of the past few decades from my perspective. Criticizing “the media” was a large and lively genre on the right, to which I have made my own contributions over the years. But when the right got the chance to build its own media institutions, it started out proclaiming itself “fair and balanced” and ended up building a system of crude partisan propaganda. (So much so that the Russians have been stealing it.) The complaint that the mainstream media is biased turned out just to be a complaint that it’s not biased towards us.

I go on to describe how the bleak future of media can be seen in rural areas, particularly the half of all US counties that, according to one report, “have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper.” I describe how this has contributed to the reversal of the old saw that “all politics is local” so that now “all politics is national.” People know Donald Trump and Joe Biden but have no idea who is running for the local offices that will have a much more direct impact on their lives.

Read the whole thing.

The Collapse of Media Leaves Us Flying Blind

In that piece, I propose some solutions—though if I had the answer, I’d be the new Rupert Murdoch (but with only one wife, thank you).

In the meantime, I’ve spent my whole career in an industry that is collapsing, so that simply being able to make a living at it, and not having to get a “real job” doing something else, is a pretty big accomplishment. This seems like a good moment to put in a “subscribe” link for this newsletter.

I have confidence we will survive in the long run, because the old business model that is collapsing was built on the ashes of previous business models. The newspapers in the days of the Founding Fathers were all partisan rags, and the media as we know it was built as a social institution over many years. Better journalistic standards had to be invented, as did the model for financing them. What we did before, we can do again.

And it could be worse. In the article above, I mention and dismiss the solution of providing more government support for media. A state-run media is exactly what we don’t need, and in passing, I put in a link to an article that deserves a little bit more attention. It describes the chaos in Poland as the new elected administration tries to reclaim state-owned media from an authoritarian party that molded it into a propaganda network.

19:30 used to be called simply Wiadomości (“The News”). It began broadcasting in November 1989, a few months after the Communists were defeated in Poland’s first free election in over forty years. In 1992, Poland’s parliament, attempting to turn the page on TVP’s legacy as a communist propaganda organ, passed a law requiring that the network provide broadcasts that were “pluralistic, impartial, well-balanced, independent, and innovative, as well as of high quality and integrity.”…

TVP has a captive audience that is disproportionately older and lives outside large cities. Unlike its private competitors, TVP’s twenty-four-hour news channel is free to watch. About a third of Poles have access only to the free channel….

In 2015, Law and Justice swept the country’s presidential and parliamentary elections, with the help of older people and those living outside big cities. The party received a simple majority—no coalition partners needed—enabling it to remake state institutions in its image. The new government pushed through a law that allowed it to fire TVP’s management. Shortly after, the government appointed a new chief, former Law and Justice lawmaker Jacek Kurski, who made no apologies about steering the network’s tone in a radically different direction. “I don’t deny that some of the viewers, especially those with liberal views, have stopped watching us,” he said in 2016. “At the same time, many conservative viewers from right-wing areas of Poland have returned to TVP.”…

Another former TVP official has said the channel’s right-wing tilt was a mistake. At a conservative post-election gathering in Warsaw, Marcin Wolski, a former director of TVP’s culture channel and host of a right-wing satirical political show, said, “I say this as an accomplice: we created propaganda at a worse level than in the 1970s.” He argued that this content was “a waste of time and money” because viewers would have voted for Law and Justice anyway. Within TVP, however, “the Stalinist logic won: whoever is not with us is against us.”…

Czajkowski said “changing the system” now was even more challenging than when the country’s Communist dictatorship was voted out. “It’s more difficult than in 1989, because [then] everyone wanted to leave the Communist times behind. Now people are confused.” Sitting in the TVP cafeteria, Czajkowski said he is trying to create a news program that will teach people “critical thinking” and appeal to all. “The situation for eight years has been created by politicians,” he added. “They turned public media into propaganda-tube, which was full of emotions for them. We are delivering a voice.” 

Poland’s fight over public broadcasting offers a window into the question of whether institutions commandeered by populists can ever go back to normal—particularly once the public sphere has been infected by populist language.

This is a cautionary tale, but also a reminder that things can get worse than they are now, and we can still bounce back from it.