A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

What the Death of Newspapers Really Means

Israel relentlessly escalates its repression, and the BDS campaign has
completely failed to deter it.

People treat the death of newspapers as a matter of concern only to
journalists. This could hardly be more misguided. Responsible journalism
is the foundation of our collective ability to address our problems as a
society: to improve "the common good
." Almost all of that
collective ability, historically, has come from newspaper reporting. As
the then-wunderkind Walter Lippmann wrote in one of the most prescient
articles ever, in a 1919 edition of The Atlantic
:

Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their
environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The
quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only
where the audience is deprived of independent access to information. But
where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is
uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to
opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities
themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts, not
what actually is.

But Lippmann was living in a relative informational paradise compared to
today. Sure, there were those in his day who would eagerly excite the
passions of the masses for nefarious purposes. But there were multiple
daily newspapers in virtually every major city; dozens in New York City
if you count the foreign-language press. Most important, sources of
deliberate disinformation were as ants to the elephants when compared to
today's Murdoch empire, the Koch network, just about all of talk
radio, pretty much every one of Facebook's most visited sites, and all
of the various sources promoting racism, sexism, antisemitism,
islamophobia, and so on, in the wake of Trump's takeover of the
Republican Party. Their purpose is to undermine truth specifically for
the reasons laid out in Lippmann's prophetic piece, with predictably
deleterious results for what remains of our democracy.

I've been obsessed with this since I wrote my first book
,
published 30 years ago-coining the word "punditocracy
," thank you
very much-and have since written about this problem a gazillion times
(for instance, in The New Yorker in 2008
and for the
American Association of University Professors

in 2011). But today's newsletter is inspired by a fresh report from
the Pew Research Center

about the calamitous drop in income earned by local U.S.
newspapers-that is, newspapers that are not the Times, the Post, and
the Journal, which uniquely have managed to create profitable national
brands. (One hopes that at least the L.A. Times will climb into this
category as well, but the results are not yet in.)

According to Pew, even though total circulation for the papers included
in its study-that is, readership both on paper and online-is
approximately what it was a year ago, it is "still among the lowest
reported: Total weekday circulation is down 40% since 2015, the first
year available for this analysis. Similarly, total Sunday circulation
has fallen 45% since 2015."

The reality behind these numbers is far worse than even those awful
numbers imply, owing to the loss of so large a percentage of print
readers, who are worth somewhere between five and ten times as much to
advertisers as digital readers are. Last year, "print weekday
circulation in 2020 was down 12% from 2019, while print Sunday
circulation declined 10%." This is despite the fact that "digital
weekday circulation was up 30% in 2020, and digital Sunday circulation
climbed 29%," which happen to constitute "the greatest
year-over-year increases for digital since 2015." Nevertheless, the
money picture is worse than ever owing to a decline of 55 percent in
both weekday and Sunday print circulation between 2015 and 2020, which
brought revenue down a terrifying 40% from 2019. (This, remember,
happened in a deeply contested election year.) Google, Facebook,
YouTube, and Twitter, together with the national news brands (on a far
smaller scale), swallowed up virtually all advertising growth; much of
that had been going to newspapers in the past. For the first time since
the American newspaper business became a business, revenue exceeded that
provided by advertising, which, not to put too fine a point on it, was
also in the toilet.

This is happening, moreover, at a time when much-ballyhooed non-legacy
news institutions were shedding their previously celebrated news
operations like so much snakeskin. (See, especially, BuzzFeed.) These
operations insist they will continue to cover some news and boast many
talented and dedicated reporters, but will be forced to invest less and
less in these operations, to the point where almost no journalists will
be able to make the kind of living they require. That will send a lot of
would-be journalists to law school and PR/advertising and the like,
further decimating their already depleted ranks.

What has been needed ever since this problem first appeared decades ago
is a major investment by establishment foundations into independent
journalism. There are clearly success stories in this arena: ProPublica
, The Texas Tribune
, and given that we are talking about
local news, the rapidly expanding Report for America
.

I remain pessimistic about this, however, not merely because I tend to
be pessimistic about everything, but also because of the epistemological
conflict between foundations and journalism. One works slowly and
carefully and is eager not to offend potential donors or other
troublemakers; the other, at least in theory, goes looking for trouble.
The attack on liberal foundations as obsessed with "woke-ism" has
some truth to it, though not nearly as much as many claim for it
. What is
unarguable is that few foundations are in the business of risk-taking,
nor of giving money to people and places they cannot control. (I suppose
this is a place to note that the support of one exceptional foundation,
the Schumann Media Center, is what makes this newsletter possible.)

I must say, however, that Philip Roth surely had a point way back in
1961 (when Commentary, believe it or not, was a great magazine) when he
said the problem with fiction was that it could not compete with reality
.
I was worried when I published my punditocracy book, Sound & Fury, in
1992 and the pieces I linked to above about the likelihood of such
realities as unnecessary wars, explosions of small-town corruption,
unrestrained despoilment of the environment by corporations, etc. It did
not occur to me that we would also face the onset of homegrown fascism
and the purposeful, even proud, destruction of democracy by the
Republican Party. But here we are.

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The news is undeniably depressing of late and it's therefore important
to search out sources of encouragement. I find these in the efforts of
people who dedicate themselves to using whatever gifts and skills they
have to make the world a better place without concern for fortune.
Seeing these, I hope, may make it easier for others to try to do the
same. I don't want to privilege one form of dedication above another;
I just want to celebrate excellence that is quietly achieved and shared.

This is a long way of introducing the book I am currently reading: Jerry
Z. Muller'
s
Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Before I
happened upon a couple of reviews of this book-and I've only seen
two-I had never heard of either the author or his subject. In reading
it, however, I am awestruck by the way Muller-who is an emeritus
historian at Catholic University-turns countless complex philosophical
and theological concepts together with important intellectual arguments
into a readable story about a person whose life, as Richard Locke has
observed, "is the stuff of a Saul Bellow novel." Embedded in this
tale of a man who betrayed virtually everyone who ever trusted him are
encounters with Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon,
Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Carl Schmitt, Emil Cioran, as well as
with forays into Kabbalism, gnosticism, Marxism, Paulist theology, the
biblical commentary of Maimonides, Sabbatarianism, Spinoza, and (the
always unavoidable) Heidegger. Taubes's teachings were especially
influential to then-future neocons like Irving Kristol, his wife, the
historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and her brother, Milton Himmelfarb, and
to people who are often mistakenly identified as neocons, including
Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.

What I find so impressive, however, is the polymathic knowledge that had
to go into Muller's ability to explain each of the ideas and arguments
that animated Taubes's own remarkable career as he moved from Germany
and then Switzerland-where he earned both his doctorate and rabbinical
certification-to New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, and eventually to the Free University of
Berlin. The story of Taubes's influence is particularly impressive
given the fact that he barely published anything of substance after his
much condensed 1947 doctoral thesis, Occidental Eschatology
.

I don't like to promote Amazon if I can help it. But take a look at
the blurbs this book has earned
.
They sound excessive, but they aren't. Yes, it's 656 pages
(including notes). But take your time with this book and you will emerge
with a far better understanding of a remarkable number of the ideas that
have shaped the intellectual life of the second half of the 20th
century. In that respect, it can be considered a companion to Louis
Menand's The Free World
,
but told in the context of a remarkably rich and oftentimes
too-bad-to-be-true life story.

I just spent two weeks in Israel (not counting a two-day foray to Petra
in Jordan), eight of them in "COVID jail" in Jaffa. It occurs to me
that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has produced just one certifiably
great rock song. Take a moment for it in this thrilling duet by its
brilliant composer and (arguably) the greatest popular singer of all
time, here .

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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