Amid the litany of laments over how Donald Trump’s nearly-there or full-blown fascist White House is ending the free press as we know it, the Baltimore City Paper quietly announced this month it was going to shut down. Well, not so quietly if you live in the area and care about a paper with a 40-year legacy of investigative reporting and arts coverage. For the city of Baltimore, it’s a devastating loss.
And it’s a reminder of the existential reckoning journalism faces, one that is not orange-haired and shrill, whining “fake news” as often as it breathes. Financial woes pose a far greater threat to the news industry than anything Trump says or does. Journalism today is dying because no one has really figured out how to financially support it in a winner-take-all capitalist system.
This is not to say that Trump isn’t pernicious for further undermining what little trust people still have in news and lying so shamelessly, so often. He is a danger. But perspective is needed for those wailing that a tyrant will doom what’s left of journalism in America. The truth is far more banal and depressing.
Consider that in the past 15 years, more than half the jobs in the news industry have disappeared, according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in April. In January 2001, the industry employed 411,800 people. In September 2016, that number plummeted to 173,709. There has been growth in online news employment over the last decade, but not enough make up for all the lost newspaper jobs. Most of these websites are concentrated in a few large cities, no solace to the small towns and more modest regions hit hardest by the industry’s collapse.
It’s an old story. Online giants such as Google and Facebook gobble up ad revenue. The classified section belongs to Craigslist. You don’t need to buy a newspaper to look up movie times or see what’s on TV or know what the weather will be like tomorrow.
The Baltimore City Paper cited declining ad revenue as the culprit for its demise. Baltimore is one of many cities that will have to muddle along with far less news coverage than it used to get. Less bodies at the courthouse. Less smart men and women holding politicians accountable. Less people getting their stories told.
The tragedy of the news industry’s collapse is how it feeds the miasma we now find ourselves in.
A whole segment of the population – mostly people who support Trump – cannot believe a single story the media reports. It’s all fake, all lies, all garbage concocted by liberal media elites to poison the minds of the populace.
There are many valid critiques to be made of the mainstream media, local media, what’s left of the alternative press, and the craft of reporting in general. I’ve been a strident media critic in the Guardian and elsewhere.
What Trumpian nihilists do is something different, something darker – they negate the entire profession’s output altogether. The tragedy is that this would be much harder to do if Trump’s biggest fans, scattered among various suburbs and exurbs and depressed towns across the country, regularly encountered vibrant local media, recognizing the constructive role it can play.
Decades ago, when small cities and towns had viable newspapers, even the most conservative readers could rail against the liberal monoliths on TV and in New York while consuming their local dailies. Reporters weren’t villains: they were neighbors, and the editor-in-chief a town fixture.
We can hate most what we don’t know. If a newspaper doesn’t operate near you for a hundred miles and you only see a live journalist if one swoops in during a presidential election – or one never shows up at all – you only know what you read about on Facebook or watch on Fox News. There is no lived reality to draw from. There are only the images and the hate, symbols and distortion.
The hope for media isn’t a Democratic president who appears to play nice with the people who come to press conferences. It’s for an economic model that works, whether it’s the mix of growing non-profits and member-funded outlets (ProPublica and De Correspondent come to mind) or the need, in the long-term, for the government to start treating news organizations like a public good, either partially subsidizing their bottom lines or offering other safeguards to keep them alive.
With a Republican Congress obsessed with defunding PBS, this is a nonstarter for now, but maybe at some future time a few wise men and women will take their place.
There will be a media after Trump. If it’s further crippled, it will have little to do with him, and everything to do with money. That’s the only reality that counts.