The American Newspaper Is Dying

Dare I say, this is slightly misleading. Anyway, it’s still worth a post. The information comes from one Freddie de Boer, a leftist who writes on Substack. Powerline reports the salient points (via Maggie’s Farm). As I have occasionally remarked, some considerable pushback against our new media overlords has been coming from the left. One should not ignore it.

As Steven Hayward astutely notes, the New York Times 1619 Project, a tissue of lies, distortions and fabrications is a symptom of the intellectual decline of newspapers. If the nation’s greatest newspaper has become a propaganda sheet, what hope is there for the rest of the industry.

The basic point, to be classed under the category-- go woke, go broke-- involves the decline and fall of the American newspaper industry. De Boer reports:

• U.S. newspaper circulation fell in 2018 to its lowest level since 1940, the first year with available data. Total daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) was an estimated 28.6 million for weekday and 30.8 million for Sunday in 2018. Those numbers were down 8% and 9%, respectively, from the previous year. Both figures are now below their lowest recorded levels, though weekday circulation first passed this threshold in 2013.

• Newspaper revenues declined dramatically between 2008 and 2018. Advertising revenue fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline.

• Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000. Newspapers drove a broader decline in overall U.S. newsroom employment during that span.

• Layoffs continue to pummel U.S. newspapers. Roughly a quarter (27%) of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018. The layoffs came on top of the roughly one-third (31%) of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017. What’s more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before.

Stick a fork in them. They’re done. 

De Boer explains that the fault lies with university humanities departments. These places produced a generation of brainwashed minions, people who know nothing beyond certain ideologically driven narratives. I would happily declare them all to be leftist narratives, of oppression and rebellion, but they also included the theory of deconstruction, a product of a Nazi philosopher who was a great supporter of Ernst Rohm’s Storm Troopers. For the record, deconstruction is something of a misnomer. The practice resembles nothing, if not a pogrom.

In De Boer's words:

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride.

Note that de Boer indicts the whole of the media here. After all, as we have been burying newspaper journalism, the task of reporting news has been given to the social media giants, Facebook, Google and Twitter. Strangely, these capitalist behemoths have been proselytizing the same radical and extremist theories that are destroying newspapers.

Obviously, no one is having an honest open conversation about the new extremist social media because they would otherwise be canceled. Unless, of course, they find their way to Substack. It’s the power of monopoly. It can be carried out by a propaganda ministry in a totalitarian country, but it is now carried out by social media titans in our totalitarian country.