All the News that Fits

 

If you have seen those old black and white Westerns, TV series or movies, you know that every town seemed to have a hotel (bordello?), a church, a sheriff’s office/jail, at least one saloon, a blacksmith, a dry goods store and the local newspaper. Town newspapers and the church held the community together, and the focus of discussions was mostly on issues of local interest. Old world typesetting, politics, weather and local crimes, sometimes laced with ads. With a touch of gossip. As literacy increased, town papers continued, but battles for readers in the biggest cities made what today would be mega-billionaires. 

Hard news succumbed to sensationalism, and sensationalism often grew into less-than-credible stories ranging from two-headed men to lurid and often-made-up details of heinous crimes. Big city papers became nationally important. Stirring passions and prejudices sold papers. To get readers, the owners of these rags engaged in what became known as “yellow journalism” – a style of writing that was built on these lurid and sensational stories, anything to attract readers and advertisers. Today, that form of print journalism continues in tabloids, often stacked by the checkout stand at grocery and drug stores. 

Sensationalism seems to have hit its stride at the end of the 19th century and slightly beyond. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains: “Joseph Pulitzer had purchased the New York World in 1883 and, using colourful, sensational reporting and crusades against political corruption and social injustice, had won the largest newspaper circulation in the country. His supremacy was challenged in 1895 when William Randolph Hearst, the son of a California mining tycoon, moved into New York City and bought the rival Journal. Hearst, who had already built the San Francisco Examiner into a hugely successful mass-circulation paper, soon made it plain that he intended to do the same in New York City by outdoing his competitors in sensationalism, crusades, and Sunday features…

“The era of yellow journalism may be said to have ended shortly after the turn of the 20th century, with the World’s gradual retirement from the competition in sensationalism. Some techniques of the yellow journalism period, however, became more or less permanent and widespread, such as banner headlines, coloured comics, and copious illustration. In other media, most notably television and the Internet, many of the sensationalist practices of yellow journalism became more commonplace.” Local papers still continued to have relevance for communities of every size across the nation. The telegraph, later the telephone, gave rise to national reporting available to local papers as well. National crises – the Great Depression and two World Wars – were carried everywhere. 

Radio began to attract listeners, and news became available through that medium. But the rise of television in the 1940s and 50s began to put serious economic pressure on local print media. By the time the Internet effectively allowed customized and highly filtered access to “news,” local papers were already dying in droves. The fundamental economics of “news” media had shifted, with a profound impact on what average Americans were focusing on. 

Slowly, national stories began to attract local communities, creating massive political polarization, under an entirely new system mass communication. And big money campaign influence, unleashed by the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United vs FEC, further fractionalized national attitudes. But the changes in mass media over the years had already eroded the importance of local issues. The advent of television cannot be underestimated.

The September 23rd Yale Insights tells us: “Since 2004, nearly 2,000 local newspapers in the U.S. have shut down, eliminating an important source of local information and news for many Americans. Six percent of counties now have no newspaper at all. Blame for this decline falls most heavily on the internet, which sucked away advertising revenue and offered plenty of content for free, but it’s worth noting that the trend started before the internet was even a distant dream.

“‘We’ve long seen alarmist headlines about the death of local journalism,’ says Michael Sinkinson, an assistant professor of economics at Yale [School of Management]. ‘These kinds of closures have been happening for decades.’

“A new study co-authored by Sinkinson looks back at a period when another a new technology was threatening the dominance of newspapers: television. With Charles Angelucci of MIT and Julia Cagé of Sciences Po Paris, Sinkinson examined the effect of television’s spread in the 1940s and ’50s on the health of local newspapers, and the consequences for an informed citizenry. The team found that local papers began to wither as television drew away readers and advertisers—and that without a reliable source of local news, citizens appeared to be less engaged with local politics…

“It was easy to imagine that national TV would eat into the revenue and circulation of local newspapers; but they thought it was also possible that TV would complement local news, creating greater appetite for in-depth local stories… The results showed that readers began to put down their newspapers to watch TV—and advertisers followed.

“‘The first big takeaway is that we find a large substitution away from papers, particularly evening papers, and toward TV,’ Sinkinson says. National advertisers, specifically, diverted much of their budget for the local marketplace to television… Sinkinson notes that this moment did not mark the beginning of a collapse of local newspapers. In fact, the newspaper business continued to grow during the introduction of TV, despite the competition, but it grew more slowly than previously—and more slowly than TV audiences were growing. This decline in growth meant a 5-10% loss of revenue for newspapers and, as Sinkinson puts it, ‘no business is excited to hear about a 5-10% drop in revenue.’ One response was slimmer papers, with less coverage of everything from national news to sports to local news…

“What became of the newspapers that were losing readers and advertisers to television seven decades ago? Of the 102 local papers that the authors scrutinized the content of, just 10 were available to examine in 2017 (the researchers looked for newspapers that produced a print format with full issues available online). Those still in publication published fewer stories and fewer of those were original local content.

“The loss of local papers troubles Sinkinson—among other things, they serve to keep people informed about corruption and misdeeds among their elected officials, and often break stories with wider reverberations; a small paper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, revealed the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, for instance. And as local news fades, local politics becomes increasingly nationalized—which, other researchers have found, contributes to political polarization.” 

You are more likely to hear about Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi these days, even in local periodicals in all but the biggest American cities, than you are to read about local political issues. And if television galvanized American attention to national over local issues, social media was even more devastating to local priorities. That economic and cultural slam to truth and public information seems only to be accelerating.

I’m Peter Dekom, the very definition of who we are as Americans, what we care about and what draws our attention, has slowly split our electorate into passionate and seemingly irreconcilable factions focused primarily on national politics.