The American media after political circus leaves town
THE past year has turned the US into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could the US election drama and its executive producer, Donald Trump, possibly have in store for us now?
No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit.
And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the centre of the paper-andink branch of the industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago”, as the Wall Street Journal editor-inchief Gerard Baker said on Friday.
Papers including the Journal, the New York Times, the Guardian, Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganise, shed staff and/or kill off whole sections. Taken together, it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for the voting public.
It couldn’t be happening at a worse moment in American public life. The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.
As Mike Cernovich, a Twitter star, alt-right news provocateur and promoter of Hillary Clinton health conspiracies, boasted in last week’s New Yorker, “Someone like me is perceived as the new Fourth Estate.” His content can live alongside that of the Times or the Journal or the Washington Post on the Facebook newsfeed and be just as well read. On Saturday, he called on a President Trump to disband the White House press corps.
He may not have to. All you have to do is look at the Gannett cuts on its Washington staff, which Politico recently likened to a “blood bath”. Even before this year’s ad revenue drop, the number of full-time journalists – nearly 33,000 according to the 2015 census – was on the way to being half what it was in 2000.
That contraction in the reporting ranks, combined with the success of disinformation, is making for some sleepless nights for those in DC who will have to govern in this bifurcated, real-news-fake-news environment. It does not augur well for the future.
The cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good jour- nalism. And how well the news media get through their post-election hangover will have a lot to do with how the next chapter in the American political story is told.
That’s why the dire financial reports from US newsrooms are so troubling. If the reporting corps is going to be reduced even further during such an election-driven readership boom, what are things going to look like when the circus leaves town?
The Times article revealing Trump’s nearly $1 billion tax loss in 1995 drew some 5.5 million page views. That’s huge. The Washington Post doesn’t share its numbers, but behold the more than 13,000 online comments attached to just one of David A Fahrenthold’s articles about how Trump ran his charity in ways that clashed with philanthropic conventions.
But in this new era, subscriber numbers are more important than fly-by-night readership.
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the Times’s newly named deputy publisher, point- ed to a bright spot in last week’s earnings report. Mixed in with a 19 percent drop in print advertising revenue was a 21 percent increase in digital advertising and the addition of 116,000 new digital-only subscriptions.
“It shows people are willing to pay for great, original, deeply reported and expert journalism,” Sulzberger said. “That will allow great journalism to thrive.”
It could be Pollyannaish to think so, but maybe this year’s explosion in fake news will serve to raise the value of real news.
“People will ultimately gravitate toward sources of information that are truly reliable, and have an allegiance to telling the truth,” Baron said. “People will pay for that because they’ll realise they’ll need to have that in our society.”
As the Times’s national political correspondent Jonathan Martin wrote on Twitter last week, “Folks, subscribe to a paper. Democracy demands it.”