Do We Need the American News Media?
Ezra Klein, founder of Vox.com and now an opinion columnist for the New York Times told his audience recently that “the middle has collapsed in journalism.” The middle of what? I figured this was worth becoming knowledgeable about during an election year.
What I learned: 2.5 newspapers a week closed in 2023. And that means local newspapers, the kind that give you news about your own community. This trend comes from a changing and misunderstood advertising climate. No one has figured out how to advertise to weekly newspaper readers now that they are online. Most of the papers that have vanished are closely tied to weekly publications. And often they are in areas of the country where there are no other publications.
According to a Northwestern University study, the US has lost 1/3 of its newspapers and 2/3 of its newspaper journalists since 2005. Well, we all knew newspapers were going out of business. That’s just the backup data. Magazines lasted a little bit longer, but Sports Illustrated laid off its entire staff recently, and National Geographic has gone out of the print media business. Venerable brands have just thrown in the towel. Why? It’s the unforgiving advertising business model, colliding with consumer demand for privacy.
Network television is in the same shape. You can be a prime time anchor, and have an audience of less than a half million people a broadcast.. So, as much as Donald Trump says the mainstream media are too far left, or fake news or whatever, the bigger truth is that there is no mainstream media anymore..
Media is fractal.Everybody is doing a combination of social media and streaming television. This new blend of using the TV as a TV sometimes and using it as a 75” monitor for streaming entertainment over the internet at others is called “smart TV.” As if the internet somehow made your TV smarter. Smart TV itself doesn’t have long to go either as younger people are getting most of their news from apps we adults who vote don’t use.
The primary news site for younger people is TikTok, followed closely by YouTube. Channels on YouTube have humongous audiences for news, but not news produced in the US. Al Jazeera alone has 15.9 million subscribers in Arabic. And it is not first on the list. Many top news sites on YouTube are from countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, India, or Philippines. The United States is way behind in global media innovation or in global audience development for news.
That means that in the United States, there is very little access to traditional news because American news sites are not prominent on YouTube or TikTok. American news is not reaching global viewers, or at least not younger viewers. In the past, most news came with an American voice, and that’s how we exported democracy. Now the voices are from the East.
While I am a fan of global voices, what does this mean for the next American election? I think it was Jefferson who said that democracy required an educated electorate. But doesn’t an educated electorate require an independent “fourth estate" to provide information on the issues of the day? Wikipedia tells us that “The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues. Who is framing political issues currently? Political consultants and their ad agencies.
Maybe not. It’s hard to deny that people actually still do consume news, and plenty of it. Keep your ear on podcasts, for example. Joe Rogan’s average episode on Spotify reaches 11 million listeners. That is more than any of the major networks can boast.
Maybe the next generation gets its news differently, and makes up its collective mind differently, and America is no longer the great hegemon. We go on living anyway, don’t we? Like the Brits, the French, or any other former empire.
You can tell I am swinging back and forth on this topic like a pendulum. Anyone have any helpful thoughts or opinions to offer ?