Two days after the elections the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, wrote to all of his subscribers:
"After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump's sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?"
Sulzberger never answers his own question (the answer is yes!) but with the Times only weeks away from downsizing its own news room-as has been previously announced-his unusual letter seems to express the palpable fear that print media is rapidly approaching a terminal condition; threatening to bring us all to the day of a vanished democracy because citizens are increasingly informed only by Twitter-style one liners. Such a development is as difficult to absorb as Donald Trump's election and may be more dangerous than his election.
David Lieberman of USA Today writes about the "fear of losing all-important subscribers to its print and digital editions at a time of plummeting advertising revenue and challenges from online news venues." There are signs all around. Some newspapers were hit with waves of subscriber cancellations in September after they endorsed Secretary Clinton. Lieberman reports "at least one city - possibly San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis or Cleveland - likely will soon lose its last daily newspaper. It "could be a lot more widespread than people have been predicting," says Mike Simonton, who tracks media debt for Fitch Ratings. "It's hard to ignore that possibility as the pace of newspaper closings accelerates."
"Starting Wednesday, Hearst's 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer survives as a scaled-down online publication offering mostly commentary. That leaves The Seattle Times as the city's only major paper-and-ink daily. Gannett...parent of USA TODAY, may shutter the 140-year-old Tucson Citizen, which competes with the Arizona Daily Star, if a buyer can't be found."
Cable TV has a different but related affliction. Its fierce pursuit of viewers led it to bet heavily on expert panels who were often demonstrably inexpert. Except for a few panelists from the Trump side, they turned out by Wednesday morning to have been dead wrong. David Axlerod, speaking among the large panels of experts on CNN when the evening was yet young on November 9th prophesied "a Trump victory is very, very unlikely." He had been chief strategist of Barak Obama's campaigns, and Senior White Adviser. If he didn't know what was happening across the country who did?
So went this catastrophic failure of a long list of experts and moderators including Rachel Maddow, star of MSNBC, Amy Walter at PBS and many others. After the elections dozens of interviews in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin uncovered that local citizens had stopped listening to these commentators a long time ago. It turns out that these experts knew mostly their own mirror images. They could not see the inequality suffered by nearly two-thirds of the American people because it had moved beyond their comfortable, "expert" horizons, out of sight.
Therein lies a tragedy greater than a Trump victory (if you think it was tragic). It's not only the print media who are at-risk because of lost advertising and diminished circulation, so also are the TV media whose high pitched spiels require us to accept news delivered primarily to sell products by entertaining us. One imagines their budgets for hiring expert panels has dropped lots.
Russia's Vladamir Putin, and before him Stalin and Adolph Hitler, strengthened their hold on authoritarian government by eliminating a free press. President-elect Trump need take no such steps, even if he wished to, because the chickens of our disdain have come home to roost. Our preference for well-rehearsed PBS and cable round tables may become the thin soup of an increasingly thinned out journalism. Bad for democracy, even worse for the common good. Paint Donald Trump ugly if you wish, but the real tragedy is what we're doing to ourselves.
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