I was surprised — but not shocked — to discover recently that The Washington Post is phasing out its blue app, which at one time it called the “National Digital Edition.”
The app, which debuted in 2015, was an important part of the Post’s strategy during the early years of Jeff Bezos’ ownership. I wrote about it in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.” Available on phones and tablets, it provided readers with a colorful, magazine-like experience. The National Digital Edition was also cheaper than the Post’s other digital products; it was marketed to a national audience and omitted all news from the Washington area. That way, Washingtonians couldn’t save money by choosing the blue app unless they were willing to do without any local news.
The blue app had a lot to do with the Post’s meteoric growth in digital subscriptions, especially after the paper offered it to Amazon Prime members for free for six months, earning hosannas from a wide cross-section of media observers. Media analyst Ken Doctor, a recent guest on our “What Works” podcast, called it “potentially game-changing.”
Even as the Post was marketing the National Digital Edition, though, it continued to evolve its black app and, of course, its website. Those provided readers with a more traditional experience, including a home page, which the blue app lacked, as well as local and regional news. At some point, too, the Post abandoned its different pricing schemes. The blue app, despite its attractiveness, always seemed a bit lite, and eventually most people just moved away from it.
I hadn’t checked the blue app in ages until the past week. When I did, I got a message that said “this app soon will no longer be available” and pushing me toward the black app instead.
The National Digital Edition served its purpose, boosting paid circulation at a time when Bezos was trying to catch up quickly with The New York Times. As of last October, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Post’s circulation was around 2.7 million. That’s well behind the Times’ 10 million (which, to be fair, includes subscriptions to non-news products such as its cooking app and crossword puzzle), but it’s impressive nevertheless.
Whenever The New York Times takes on as large and amorphous an idea as freedom of expression, it quickly escalates into a war of words about the Times itself. That was certainly the case with a nearly 3,000-word editorial it posted last Friday under the headline “America Has a Free Speech Problem.”
The piece launched a thousand hot takes, many of them dripping with mockery and sarcasm. I certainly don’t agree with everything in the editorial, and I find a lot of what the critics are complaining about — especially the paper’s patented “both-sides-ism” — to be right on target. But in the spirit of contrarianism, and in recognition that this is a Major Statement by our leading newspaper, I’m at least going to take it seriously.
It was an unremarkable story. On Jan. 26, The New York Times published a real-estate feature about Robbinsville, New Jersey, a community that has become increasingly prosperous and desirable since changing its name from Washington Township 15 years ago. But the article contained within it the kernel of an unpleasant truth that it would take a smaller news organization to highlight.
The Times story, by Dave Caldwell, included this:
A few years after the opening of the mixed-use Town Center development of shops, restaurants and residences, one of the first of its kind in the state, Amazon opened a fulfillment center in Robbinsville in 2014, and a corner of the township became a warehouse hub. So the township was able to build a high school, a municipal building and a police training facility without raising property taxes. That drew more residents and, in turn, more businesses….
The Amazon fulfillment center and other warehouses are on the eastern side of the Turnpike, providing separation from Town Center.
Pretty innocuous-sounding. But warehouse development is a hot issue in New Jersey — so hot that it was the subject of an hour-long event last Wednesday sponsored by NJ Spotlight News, one of the news organizations being tracked by Ellen Clegg and me for our book project, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” Spotlight, a nonprofit that focuses on state politics and policy, merged several years ago with NJ PBS.
Events can be another way of doing journalism, and Spotlight does a lot of them. The one I attended, titled “Warehouse Growth in New Jersey: Impacts and Opportunities,” shed some unexpected light on the Times’ assertions. The keynote speaker, Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, explained it this way:
About a month ago, The New York Times had a great profile of Robbinsville and all its progress. And it gleefully pointed out that its proud warehouse development was sited far from its Town Center, as if that were some remarkable feat. What the Times didn’t mention was that Robbinsville residents enjoy all the tax benefits of those warehouses with none of their impacts. Because what they’ve managed to do is outsource them completely to Allentown and Upper Freehold, where they’ve dumped them on their border. The traffic, air pollution, crime and noise that are all centered on the residential areas of two communities that derive exactly none of their benefits that don’t stop at the municipal border. It’s a nice trick if you can manage it, and it’s Exhibit A for why we desperately need to think beyond municipal borders.
Rasmussen’s point was that regional and state governments need to regulate runaway warehouse development in New Jersey in order to prevent exactly the kind of situation that the Times praised — locating the facilities on the outskirts, where they detract from the quality of life in other communities.
Micah Rasmussen
Before sitting in on the webinar, I had no idea what an issue warehouse development is in New Jersey. I am not going to go into any details except to observe that Rasmussen and the panelists, moderated by Spotlight reporter Jon Hurdle, had plenty to talk about.
One of the panelists, Kim Gaddy, national environmental justice director of Clean Water Action and a New Jersey activist, spoke passionately about the disproportionate effects of warehouse development on communities of color.
“When we think about the proliferation of warehouses throughout our region and concentrated in Black, brown and low-wealth communities that have historically borne the brunt of this,” she said, “it is for this reason that we believe that we cannot talk about where or how warehouses are distributed but why is it that we need these facilities in the first place.”
Kim Gaddy
The rest of the panel comprised a representative from the warehouse industry; an official from the New Jersey League of Municipalities; and the executive director of New Jersey Future, a planning and land-use organization.
My purpose in attending was not to become an expert on New Jersey’s warehouse issues. Rather, I wanted to see how a small news organization makes use of events to extend its reach. The webinar itself reached nearly 250 people, and is now the subject of a story on Spotlight’s website. The discussion also provided ample material for follow-up stories.
There was nothing especially wrong with that New York Times story. But there was a lot more to it — and it takes journalism that is invested in the communities it covers to bring that to light.
To the extent that fading right-wing icon Sarah Palin had any strategy in pursuing her deeply flawed libel suit against The New York Times, it was this: to force a reconsideration of protections for the press that had stood for nearly 60 years, thus exacting vengeance against her tormenters in what she once infamously labeled “the lamestream media.”
It’s at least theoretically possible that could still happen. But the devastating manner in which she lost has made it less likely, not more, that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually take her up on her invitation to weaken or overturn its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision.
First came U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s move on Monday to throw out the case and rule in the Times’ favor.
Rakoff was troubled by the 2017 Times editorial at the heart of the case, which claimed — falsely — that Jared Loughner, who shot then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others in 2011, had been incited by a map put together by Palin’s political action committee that depicted gunsights over Giffords’ district and those of 19 other Democrats.
“I don’t mean to be misunderstood,” Rakoff said. “I think this is an example of very unfortunate editorializing on the part of the Times.” But Palin’s lawyers did not present any evidence that the error was anything other than a sloppy mistake by then-editorial page editor James Bennet, who was contrite and apologetic during his testimony.
Rakoff did not inform the jurors of his ruling, instead allowing them to move ahead with their deliberations in order to assemble a more complete record for the inevitable appeals. That only added to Palin’s humiliation, as all nine jurors voted against her when they announced their verdict on Tuesday.
“Your job was to decide the facts, my job is to decide the law,” Rakoff said. “As it turns out, they were in agreement in this case.”
Press advocates had worried that the case could substantially weaken Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 court ruling that public officials cannot win a libel suit unless they are able to show that a false, defamatory story about them was published or broadcast with “actual malice” — that is, with the knowledge that it was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth. That protection was later extended to public figures.
Palin is all of the above — a former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate who transformed herself into an all-purpose celebrity. A ruling in her favor would have rendered the actual-malice standard meaningless.
There are, of course, those who have railed against Times v. Sullivan for years. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump vowed he would “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
And as I’ve written previously, two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have said they would like to revisit Times v. Sullivan. But though Thomas appears ready to overturn the decision in its entirety and return libel law to the states, Gorsuch has indicated he would take a more subtle approach. Because the Palin verdicts are so clear-cut, it may be difficult for the justices to use them as a reason to sink their fangs into the Sullivan decision.
Rakoff’s unusual two-part approach presents an additional obstacle to Palin’s hopes for winning on appeal. As David Folkenflik reported for NPR, if an appeals court were to set aside Rakoff’s verdict, the jury’s verdict would still be in effect.
Finally, the case helped demonstrate the importance of First Amendment protections even for bad journalism — which the Times’ editorial surely was. Bennet inserted language into an editorial — “the link to political incitement was clear” — that was patently false and defamatory. There was no connection between Palin’s map and the shooting of Gabby Giffords and others. (Although it would not be surprising to learn that the jury considered the fact that Palin really did publish that grossly irresponsible map.)
But the media must have the freedom to report on matters of public importance without being subjected to crippling lawsuits because of inadvertent mistakes. As Justice William Brennan wrote in the Sullivan decision, “erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate, and … it must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the ‘breathing space’ that they ‘need … to survive.’”
So Times v. Sullivan lives — for now. Whether Palin’s lawyers will somehow be able to transform their resounding defeat into a winner on appeal remains to be seen. But a federal judge and a jury of Palin’s peers saw through her bogus complaint. For now, that’s enough.
Lincoln Millstein played a critical role in launching The Boston Globe’s free digital site, boston.com, in 1995. Boston.com began as a portal, and carried Globe journalism but also curated other news sites and community blogs. It had a separate staff, and the office was in downtown Boston, not in the old Dorchester plant. Lincoln went on to be executive vice president at New York Times Digital, then moved on to the Hearst Corporation, where he held a number of different roles.
When Lincoln retired as senior assistant to CEO Steven Swartz of Hearst in 2018, he wondered what was next. He found the answer by returning to his roots as a local reporter, recalling the days when he started out in the Middletown bureau of the Hartford Courant in the mid-1970s.
He and his wife, Irene Driscoll, also a longtime journalist, had upgraded their summer place in Maine in anticipation of spending more time there in retirement. Then the pandemic hit, and they moved in. He started picking up lots of local scoops on how the pandemic was affecting businesses. Not to mention the occasional deer collision. That’s how The Quietside Journal got its start.
For the past several years, a few conservative judges have been saying they’re ready to do what was once unthinkable: reverse the libel protections that the press has enjoyed since the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision.
The threat began with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote in 2019 that he believed it was time to return libel jurisdiction to the states. It accelerated in early 2021, when Laurence Silberman, an influential judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, called Times v. Sullivan “a profound mistake.” And it reached a crescendo of sorts last fall, when Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said that he, too, thought the time had come to revisit what has been settled law for nearly 60 years.
Soon an opportunity may arrive for Thomas and Gorsuch to act on their words — and it comes in the unlikely person of Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate whose caustic attacks on “the lamestream media” presaged the Age of Trump.
Palin is suing The New York Times for libel, claiming that a 2017 editorial tying her incendiary rhetoric to the 2011 shooting of then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords — a crime that also claimed the lives of six people — was false and defamatory. Jury selection in the long-delayed trial had been set to begin this past Monday in U.S. District Court. Then we learned that Palin had tested positive for COVID-19. “She is of course unvaccinated,” said Judge Jed Rakoff. Yes, of course. And the proceedings have been delayed until Feb. 3.
There is no question that there were mistakes in the Times editorial, published after a gunman shot and injured several members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Stephen Scalise. The Times compared the event to the Giffords shootings and noted that Palin’s political action committee had published a map on Facebook with gunsights over the districts of several members of Congress it hoped to defeat — including Giffords.
After that, things went awry. First, the editorial originally stated that the map targeted “electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.” In fact, the map targeted only the districts, not the members themselves. More consequentially, the editorial tied the map to the shootings, stating: “In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear.” (You can read the original Times editorial here, at the Internet Archive; the revised and corrected version is here. You can see the map here.)
There’s an old saying that bad cases make bad law, and this may prove to be a bad case. Palin may be an unsympathetic figure, but the Times is the epitome of an arrogant, out-of-touch institution — the very symbol of the liberal establishment. Worse, its editorial really did falsely claim that the Palin map led directly to the Giffords shootings. In fact, there is no evidence that Loughner, the mentally ill gunman, ever even knew about Palin’s ad.
So why does this matter? Under the Times v. Sullivan standard, Palin, as a public figure, can’t win her suit unless she is able to show that the Times acted with “actual malice” — that is, that it knew what it had published was false or strongly suspected it was false, a standard known as “reckless disregard for the truth.”
In fact, as Bill Grueskin wrote in an in-depth overview of the case for the Columbia Journalism Review last fall, there is more than ample evidence that the Times acted out of sloppiness, not venality. The then-editorial page editor, James Bennet, added the errors while he was editing the piece, apparently oblivious to the actual facts. (Bennet’s tenure came to an end in 2020 after he ran an op-ed by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton calling for military force against Black Lives Matter protesters. It turned out that Bennet hadn’t even stirred himself to read Cotton’s screed before publication.)
The whole point of the Times v. Sullivan decision is to protect the media from libel actions brought by public officials and public figures on the basis of inadvertent or careless mistakes, which is what seems to be at issue in the Palin case. But will a jury see it that way?
A couple more points about the Palin case.
First, I haven’t seen much emphasis in pretrial coverage on the Times’ original description of the gunsights on Palin’s map as being over the members of Congress (suggesting that photos of them were used) rather than over their districts. It will be interesting to see how much Palin’s lawyers make of that once the trial begins.
Second, and more substantively, is that in order for a libel suit to succeed, the plaintiff must prove what was published about them was false and defamatory. And here’s where I find myself wondering how strong a case Palin actually has. The most significant falsehood in the Times editorial had nothing to do with anything that Palin or her PAC said or did; rather, it was the assertion that Loughner was incited to violence by the Palin map.
It remains an undeniable fact that Palin’s PAC published a map with gunsights over the districts of the 20 Democrats, accompanied by such belligerent rhetoric as: “We’ll aim for these races and many others. This is just the first salvo in a fight to elect people across the nation who will bring common sense to Washington. Please go to sarahpac.com and join me in the fight.”
Given that, how can Palin claim that the Times published anything false about her? What she did was mind-bogglingly irresponsible, and I’m not sure why it matters that her actions did not lead to any actual violence.
I put the question to a couple of First Amendment experts. One, Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate, said that the Times’ (mostly) truthful description of Palin’s actions should cut against Palin’s libel claims. “Since the Times accurately described what Palin did,” Silverglate told me by email, “it would not matter whether it actually incited violence.
Taking a different view was Justin Silverman, a lawyer who is executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition. “Just because Loughner didn’t use the map as motivation, [that] doesn’t mean that readers of the NYT weren’t told that he did — which arguably is the same as being told that Palin incited the violence and is responsible for that violence by publishing her map,” he said in an email. Silverman added: “By incorrectly saying that Loughner was motivated by the map, isn’t the NYT also incorrectly saying that Palin incited Loughner by publishing it?”
Nevertheless, Silverman said the Times should prevail if it is able to prove that its errors resulted from “sloppy journalism” rather than actual malice.
Which brings us back to where we started. Regardless of whether Palin wins her case, it seems likely that it will begin to wend its way through the appeals process — and perhaps to the Supreme Court.
Historically, conservative as well as liberal justices have supported strong First Amendment protections. But now we have two justices who appear ready to modify or overturn a vitally important precedent. And we are already seeing signs that the six conservative justices may be willing to overturn longstanding precedents such as Roe v. Wade, the 1972 case that guarantees the right to an abortion.
Powerful institutions are held to account by a powerful press. Without Times v. Sullivan, news organizations are likely to shy away from investigative reporting for fear of losing libel cases because of carelessness or unavoidable mistakes.
It would be a bitter irony if Sarah Palin, of all people, proves to be the vehicle through which the media are taken down.
I.F. Stone liked to say that The New York Times was the world’s most exciting newspaper, because you never knew where you were going to find a front-page story.
That’s certainly the case today, as the Times buries what might be the most important and disturbing news of the day at the bottom of page A22. That’s where we learn that Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram, a Tennessee couple, were refused their request to adopt a child from a state-funded agency because they’re Jewish. The agency, the Holston United Methodist Home for Children, which claims to be Christian, insists that adoptive couples adhere to “Christian biblical principles.” The Rutan-Rams, who had sought to adopt a 3-year-old boy living in Florida, are now suing the state with the help of Americans United for the Separation of Church and state.
“I felt like I’d been punched in the gut,” Elizabeth Rutan-Ram said in a news release quoted by the Knoxville News Sentinel, which reported on the case last week. “It was the first time I felt discriminated against because I am Jewish. It was very shocking. And it was very hurtful that the agency seemed to think that a child would be better off in state custody than with a loving family like us.”
What could be enabling this grotesque antisemitism? According to the Times, the case “comes nearly two years after Gov. Bill Lee signed a law that allows state-funded child-placement agencies to decline to assist in cases that ‘would violate the agency’s written religious or moral convictions or policies.'” Lee, a Republican, acted despite being warned by the ACLU that it was unconstitutional.
I’m glad that the Times at least picked up on this. And I realize that print placement doesn’t mean a whole lot these days. But it’s still a signal of what the editors think is important, and the Times remains a cheat sheet for other news organizations across the country. This is an enormously important story — a further indication of the dark places into which the Republican right is dragging us.
My Northeastern colleague Laurel Leff wrote a book some years back called “Buried by the Times,” which detailed how the Times played down news about the Holocaust during World War II. Though the two situations can hardly be compared, it is nevertheless disturbing to see the Times today giving such short shrift to a modern case of antisemitism.
The plight of the Rutan-Rams — and the role of Tennessee officials — should be in the headlines for days to come. And the Times should follow up. On page one.
Imagine that you’re the editor of a big-city daily newspaper whose reporting staff has been slashed by its corporate owner. You struggle to cover the basics — local politics, business, the arts. But you’ve managed to preserve a fairly robust sports section. After all, a lot of your readers are avid fans. If they no longer needed to come to you for coverage of their favorite teams, then your circulation, already sliding, would fall off a cliff.
Well, your worst nightmare just came true. The New York Times Co.’s announcement last Thursday that it was buying The Athletic represents nothing less than an existential crisis for regional newspapers.
The Athletic is a five-year-old website that covers sports — not just national sports, but local sports as well. If sports is the only reason you haven’t stopped subscribing to your local newspaper, that’s about to change. You’ll soon be able to buy a digital subscription to The New York Times that includes The Athletic’s coverage.
“This acquisition should make mid-market metro newspaper publishers shudder,” wrote David Skok, a former top editor at The Boston Globe who’s now the editor of a Canadian business website he founded called The Logic. “The Times can now offer a unique bundle of international, national and local news that offers readers a value proposition better than that of many local newspapers with eroding sports coverage and whose news sections largely consist of wire copy from The Associated Press, Reuters and even The New York Times’ syndication service.”
The Times Co.’s acquisition of The Athletic was a certified big deal. The company paid $550 million in cash, making it the Times’ largest takeover since it purchased The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, according to Alex Webb of Bloomberg Businessweek. (The Times Co. sold the Globe to Red Sox principal owner John Henry in 2013 for $70 million — among the more devastating markdowns in media history.)
The Athletic, with 1.2 million subscribers, will help push the Times’ paid circulation for all of its projects from about 8 million closer to its goal of 10 million. The Athletic is currently a money-loser, but, as Webb writes, the Times Co. will seek to close the gap by selling more advertising and by “cross-selling the products: persuading existing Times subscribers to pay for the Athletic and vice versa.”
That strategy has already proven successful with other Times products such as its Cooking app and Wirecutter, a consumer recommendation site that it acquired several years ago. Although the Times Co. hasn’t announced exactly how The Athletic will be priced, it seems likely that it will be included with its All Access digital subscription and sold separately to those who have a cheaper Basic subscription, or no Times subscription at all.
It’s the attractiveness of getting The Athletic bundled with an All Access subscription to the Times that has got to be causing local newspaper executives to break into a cold sweat. You might think that the best way for local newspapers to fight back is by offering quality. And, of course, there’s something to that. But cultural changes, not just newsroom reductions, put local news at an enormous disadvantage.
We are living at a moment when national trends trump anything taking place at the local level. We follow national news avidly — if not quite as obsessively as we did during Donald Trump’s presidency — while paying less and less attention to what is going on in our communities. Even local school committee races are dominated by national issues such as critical race theory rather than math scores and who can most effectively negotiate a new contract with the teachers union.
Given those trends, a high-quality regional paper like the Globe may not be safe from the Times-Athletic juggernaut. The economies of scale being what they are, an All Access subscription to the Times is actually a little bit cheaper than a digital subscription to the Globe. In addition, surely there is a contingent of Globe readers who come for the sports and don’t care all that much about the paper’s comprehensive regional coverage. It’s a good thing that the Globe’s sports reporting continues to be as strong as it is.
Aron Pilhofer of Temple University puts it this way: “The Times has placed itself in direct competition with every local news site for the same pool of subscribers. And since the average number of news sites people will pay for is one, that is very bad news indeed for local legacy news organizations.”
What’s especially disconcerting is that the Times is pulling away from the journalistic pack to an extent that couldn’t have been imagined a few years ago. Since the late aughts, the paper has avoided a close call with bankruptcy, moved far ahead in its competition with the resurgent Washington Post and now is threatening to overwhelm large swaths of the regional media ecosystem.
At a time when local news is in crisis, with newsrooms downsizing and papers closing, the Times’ dominance is starting to look like a threat to our ability to inform ourselves about what’s taking place in our communities and neighborhoods.
The acquisition of The Athletic may be good for the Times. It remains to be seen whether it’s good for democracy.
Yevgeniya Plakhina at the 2009 Eurasian Media Forum
My international travel portfolio is odd, to say the least. It consists of two countries: Canada — and Kazakhstan. I visited the former Soviet republic in the spring of 2009 after being invited to take part in the Eurasian Media Forum, which brought together several hundred journalists, academics and political figures.
At the time, Kazakhstan was a semi-authoritarian country that, we all hoped, was starting to open itself up to the West. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. The longtime president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, tightened his control over the years. And now Nazarbaev’s successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has cracked down on protests and appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin for help.
The country has slid from 125th on Reporters without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index in 2009 to 155th today. The organization’s report for 2021 says that
the state is modernizing its methods of repression and, in particular, exercising more control over the Internet, where surveillance is now widespread, news sites, social media and messaging services are now subjected to more “effective” periodic cuts, and bloggers have been jailed or confined to psychiatric clinics.
The Eurasian Media Forum was organized by Nazarbaev’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, who fancied herself as something of an intellectual. The event was aimed at providing the regime with some respectability. The most memorable part of the conference, though, was a protest by a group of young activists over Nazarbaev’s censorship of the internet, a protest that led to several arrests.
Adil Nurmakov in 2009
One of the activists, a young woman named Yevgeniya Plakhina, disrupted the proceedings and demanded that her friends be released. My friend the late Danny Schechter and I interviewed Plakhina, and I wrote about it for The Guardian. It was not exactly the sort of publicity the regime was hoping for. I also interviewed Adil Nurmakov, a political activist who at that time was an editor for Global Voices Online, a project then based at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center that tracks citizen media around the world.
The conference ended with a party sponsored by the International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times Co.) and CNN International — a conflict of interest they would have been better off avoiding. We were treated to a troupe of scantily clad go-go dancers (“This is a nominally Muslim country!” Schechter yelled at me over the noise, laughing) and a chorus of singers anchored by none other than Dariga Nazarbayeva. Below is a video I recorded of their performance.
Needless to say, Kazakhstan is hardly alone in backsliding on the way to democracy. We’re not doing that well in the United States, either. Neverthess, it’s sad to see that the hopes people had a dozen years ago have ended in violence and the arrival of Russian troops.
It was obvious to just about everyone that the media were going to face a challenging year after losing the artificial stimulant provided by the Trump presidency. “Will audience and revenue resume the downward track they had been on for years before Trump demanded everyone’s unwavering attention?” I asked last January.
The answer: Yes, indeed.
David Bauder of The Associated Press has pulled together the numbers. The situation is especially grim on cable news, where weekday prime-time viewership was down 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News and 25% at MSNBC. (Fox still has by far the largest audience of the three.)
I’m not shedding any tears, crocodile or otherwise. Cable news is bad for you. The formula at all three consists of keeping you riled up and angry so that you don’t change the channel. Fox adds weaponized right-wing propaganda about COVID, the Jan. 6 insurrection, critical race theory and more. So please, touch that dial.
Then again, everything’s down, not just cable news. Viewership of the three network evening newscasts — higher quality than their cable brethren — declined 12% to 14%. Unique monthly visitors to the websites of The New York Times and The Washington Post dropped — although paid digital subscriptions to the Times are up, and that’s the metric that really matters. The Post, on the other hand, reportedly dropped from about 3 million to 2.7 million digital subscriptions toward the end of the year.
None of these numbers is inherently bad. We were glued to the news to an unhealthy extent during Trump’s presidency, as we all wondered what demented action he was going to take next. Then, in 2020, we had COVID to deal with as well.
There is still plenty of news taking place. COVID remains with us, the Republican Party has gone full-bore authoritarian and Trump has never really gone away. But things are a bit calmer, if not necessarily calm.
With national news commanding fewer eyeballs, will some of that attention be diverted to local journalism? I’d like to hope so. But with hedge funds and corporate chains hollowing out hundreds of community newspapers, in a lot of places there just isn’t enough to command attention.
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