The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
David Leonhardt of The New York Times recently wrote a very important editorial. He pointed out that prior to the pandemic, because of declining advertising revenue, local newspapers had already lost 25% of their journalistic staff. Now, because of worsening ad revenue due to the lockdown, Leonhardt said that up to 50% of the writers are gone.
He is greatly concerned about that decline, and so also should be every American citizen. As Mr. Leonhardt stated, voters are less likely to go the polls if they do not have a local print newspaper to help select candidates for whom to vote. When fewer people go to the polls, corruption and polarization are far more likely to occur, he said.
Leonhardt suggested a couple of solutions to the shutting down of print newspapers. He said governments and/or private philanthropists might contribute money to weakened publications to keep them afloat. However, in that scenario the print media might feel beholden to the party in control of the government or to the particular philanthropists when the subsidies were granted.
A free press is not free if it must depend on government or individual donors for income. All of us personally need to support a free press. Without it, democracy is further enfeebled.
It is my strong opinion that democracy is being seriously undermined as increasing numbers of people rely on digital news rather than print news. Anybody can say anything on a digital “platform,” because no one automatically “vets” information that is published via the Internet.
In a journalism newsroom, it is one of the primary responsibilities of editors to establish the accuracy of what journalists write. We have all heard people make statements they have read on the Internet that they believe are beyond reproach, but we are certain these outrageous claims are absolute poppycock.
Historically, very few newspapers ever earned most of their income from subscriptions. Advertising has been the primary bread-and-butter of the newspaper business forever. Advertisers rarely worried about the content of newspapers; they only cared about how many subscribers there were.
Currently, people can use the Internet for all of their news if they choose to do so, and much or most of what they read digitally will cost them nothing. Further, advertisers pay less money to reach far more people digitally than they do in print.
COVID-19 will probably kill scores or hundreds of small-subscription newspapers. That is an unfolding tragedy few of us will sufficiently contemplate.
Some national or metropolitan print newspapers will survive, regardless of their loss of subscribers. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post will continue to exist. But when most local newspapers are not written on paper, democracy will be far more jeopardized than it already is. A quadrillion digital zeros and ones do not equal five or six hundred well-crafted journalist’s words in a well-edited newspaper. - April 30, 2020
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.