Preview

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.

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.