The Collapse of Media Leaves Us Flying Blind

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. An Associated Press article from February summed up what the beginning of this year was like:

The news website The Messenger folded on Wednesday after being in operation since only last May, abruptly putting some 300 journalists out of work. The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 100 journalists in recent weeks; Business Insider and Time magazine announced staff cuts; Sports Illustrated is struggling to survive; The Washington Post is completing buyouts to more than 200 staffers. The Post reported Thursday that The Wall Street Journal was laying off roughly 20 people in its Washington bureau; there was no immediate comment from a Journal representative. Pitchfork announced it was no longer a freestanding music site, after digital publications BuzzFeed News and Jezebel disappeared last year.

As much as we may complain about the media—a favorite American pastime—we need it. A system of representative government requires informed citizens, but the American public is increasingly flying blind.

Information Wants to Get Paid

Those of us who report the news or write our opinions would like to think that people used to buy newspapers to get access to our trenchant observations and deathless prose. Alas, this was never quite true. Information and ideas about politics might be of crucial importance to the republic, but their economic value in the marketplace has always been relatively small.

The actual reason people bought newspapers was to get a whole bundle of information, of which the news was only part. If you wanted to sell (or buy) an old car, you got a newspaper and went to the classified ads. If you were looking for a job, or if you were hiring, you relied on the “Help Wanted” section. If you were looking for love, you turned to the “personal ads.”

Now all those things happen elsewhere. Classified ads were taken over by Craigslist, eBay and possibly Etsy. Want to get a new job? There are lots of recruiting sites, though if you’re a white-collar worker, chances are you’re updating your profile on LinkedIn with a lot of annoyingly chirpy self-promotion. If you’re looking for love, you will probably be swiping left or right on the dating apps, god help you.

Newspapers also offered display ads, where you could find out if there was a good Memorial Day sale at the Fleet Farm. But the internet has swallowed a lot of that, too. Advertising now flows through Google, Amazon and Facebook, where companies can more cheaply and precisely target people who are interested in their products. There go the revenue streams that used to keep the lights on in the nation’s newsrooms.

Of course, newspapers and magazines still have subscription revenue. But with so much information and discussion available for free, people have lost the habit of paying for the news. A slogan from the early days of the internet proclaimed that “information wants to be free,” which was supposed to celebrate the unrestricted flow of information through the decentralized infrastructure of the web. But this has taken on a double meaning: Everybody wants information to be free of charge.

The problem is that information needs to get paid. The people who provide information need to be able to make a living at it—and that’s not happening. A 2023 report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism found that journalism is dying at an accelerating rate.

Since 2005, the U.S. 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.

Low-Information Voters

Having lost the habit of paying for the news, people have also lost the habit of reading the news. A Pew study shows that the problem with the media industry is not just declining ad revenue; it’s declining readership.

For the most part, daily newspaper circulation nationwide—counting digital subscriptions and print circulation—continues to decline, falling to just under 21 million in 2022, according to projections using data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Weekday circulation is down 8% from the previous year and 32% from five years prior, when it was over 30 million. Out of 136 papers included in this analysis, 120 experienced declines in weekday circulation in 2022.

For a few years, there was a “Trump bump” for national news as the constant drama of his campaign and his administration stimulated the public’s appetite. But this has predictably led to a backlash of “news fatigue,” in which the long-term decline of readership reasserted itself even more sharply.

The partial exception is that a few big names like The New York Times have managed to grow by selling online subscriptions. You can see, though, how this is being done at the expense of other news outlets. It is nice for readers across the heartland that we no longer have to get our news through a mediocre local paper but can get it from the Times, packaged along with our favorite word games. But this means that the media is consolidating into a few big brands.

One of the consequences is a widening gap between informed readers and uninformed non-readers. A small portion of us are voracious readers who take in a lot of information. But most people only casually take in information about politics while scanning to see about that sale at Fleet Farm. They are now even less likely to read anything at all about what is going on in the world or their communities. And when they do encounter information, it is often from less reputable and far less reliable sources than formerly.

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.

Even cable TV is kind of old-fashioned now. 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. Far-out radicals who might have previously recognized that they are small minorities now live in such a reverberating echo chamber that they think they represent a populist groundswell and ought to dominate one of the major political parties.

It’s no wonder we recently had our first “extremely online” president, who rallied his base with talking points from cable news and memes and conspiracy theories passed around on Facebook and Twitter.

All Politics Is National

To see what the decline of journalism leads to, look outside the big cities, which still have a large enough population to support newspapers and local news broadcasts—even if their staffs are smaller than they used to be—as well as a proliferation of more or less professional online newsletters and podcasts. The impact of the media collapse is being seen first and strongest in local news in rural areas.

The Medill School report describes the shortage of local media in much of the country: “Of the 3,143 counties in the U.S., more than half, or 1,766, have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper.”

You can also see the weakness of local media in the way that Donald Trump and other presidential candidates have been ignoring local papers in Iowa and New Hampshire, where endorsements from local news outlets used to be a coveted requirement for the presidential primaries.

The result, confirmed in a Columbia Journalism Review article, is the nationalization of politics.

The old saying “All politics is local” can officially be tossed in the dustbin of history. The local kingmakers and specific issues that used to dominate early-state primaries and caucuses don’t matter as much in an increasingly nationalized, polarized environment.

And that’s because local news outlets have been hollowed out—leaving voters less attuned to local issues, and the stations and papers themselves with much less leverage to force candidates to answer questions important to the local audience.

I have seen this for a while in the kind of ads I get in my rural area of Central Virginia. One flyer, for a politician running in this year’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, asks whether I would back him or “a pro-Biden politician.” But this is a flyer for the Republican primary, where none of his rivals are likely to be coming out in favor of the sitting Democratic president. Perhaps he is trying to refer to his eventual Democratic rival—yet the flyer doesn’t mention that opponent by name because incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine is so widely popular that he won his last reelection by 15 points.

This is the kind of ad you send out when you assume that your voters are completely ignorant about what is going on in their local elections. Or rather, it’s the ad you send out when you expect that they won’t really recognize any political figure below the level of president of the United States.

That’s what a lot of our politics looks like right now. For the right, it’s watching Fox News on satellite TV but not buying or reading a local paper. On the left, it might resemble what one man told The New York Times: “My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news, or why they would want to, in large part because it doesn’t really exist.” In this media environment, it’s natural to see all politics on the level of Trump vs. Biden and to be blind to anything closer to home.

Citizens and Journalists

If the revival of a serious, substantive and responsible politics requires the revival of the media, what are the possible solutions?

Some have proposed direct government support for media. But this creates its own palpable threat to democracy. See Poland, where an authoritarian ruling party turned the country’s state-owned broadcaster into its partisan mouthpiece, requiring a complete overhaul when the party lost power.

Others have suggested that media can be revived by nonprofit philanthropic ventures or by wealthy sponsors. But even a billionaire might not have enough money to support a large media operation indefinitely—as reporters at the Los Angeles Times found out. And there is always the risk that a wealthy sponsor will twist a media company to promote his own narrow agenda—a prospect raised by the recent news that businessman turned obnoxious Republican gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy is trying to buy a controlling interest in the semi-defunct media firm Buzzfeed.

In the past five years, many of the writers who used to work for traditional media have set up on Substack, a platform for subscription-based newsletters mostly written by individual authors. But the phrase “individual authors” indicates one of the big limitations: These are small operations without much in the way of resources needed for research or for breaking bigger stories. That’s why Substack tends to be dominated less by reporting than by commentary—which still relies on the reporting done by the dwindling traditional media outfits.

The newsletter economy is also subject to the same influences as social media: readers siloing themselves in a media environment that reinforces their prejudices—and writers being rewarded for pandering to those prejudices.

The promise of the internet is that it was supposed to unleash an army of “citizen journalists.” But that has come to mean unleashing an army of poorly informed people shouting about topics they don’t really know anything about. So perhaps that is the one useful suggestion I can offer. If we’re going to have citizen journalism, let’s have citizen journalism. There are some efforts to support local news by hiring kids out of journalism school, putting them on a stipend and sending them out across the heartland. Perhaps the better solution would be to send a few seasoned journalists out across the country to offer training, advice and mentorship to people who already live in these communities and want to inform and engage their neighbors.

No one has discovered the one big answer to this problem, if that answer even exists. It’s clear that the internet has irreparably broken the old business models for reporting, analysis and commentary—and no one has come up with a new model yet. We had better keep working on it because a free society cannot thrive if voters don’t have access to reliable and balanced information.