If you study the history of news, one thing becomes very clear: we are not living through as extraordinary a period in the history of news as some people think.
Time and time again, over hundreds of years, the same pattern has played out. There is a period where a small group of elites pay enormous amounts of money for the quality information they need to operate. Then the information business becomes popularized and the reach is expanded. That pushes the news business towards sensationalization, eroding the quality of information in favor of entertainment. And then the elites who need good information to make important financial or political decisions retreat and start high-price, high-quality news sources with limited distribution. Then the cycle repeats.
I am glossing over a lot, of course, and the ways in which the popular press is shaped and controlled changes a lot throughout history. But if you question that this is the pattern, I would urge you to read “The Invention of News.”
Our time is only extraordinary in its scale, not the narrative.
The reason that the elites always retreat to quality is that the truth of politics and economics matter to them and the decisions they need to make. The truth is valuable and they are willing to pay for it, full stop.
For those who believe in broad access to good information sources and truth, consider that the content reflects the empowerment of the people and not the other way around.
When citizens believe they are empowered financially and that their voices can make a difference, they will pay for good information to help them make better decisions. This perhaps was the reason that for so many years in the U.S. there was a strong culture of local news—people felt empowered in their local communities, so knowledge of reality mattered and was valuable to them.
In a world where people feel disempowered politically and financially, and believe that their decisions don’t have an impact, they question why should they pay for the truth. I worry that this is the situation we face today.
My friend Nick Josefowitz proposed an interesting test of this hypothesis, looking at whether sports news will thrive in the coming years as people are allowed gamble legally on sports. I think it will. I also think this is the bull case for a publication like The Athletic.
Consider also the relative strength of the New York Times versus other local papers. Is it possible that as a regional population New Yorkers simply feel more empowered and therefore more invested in real news than some of the metros where local papers are failing? I bet so.
The conclusion I would suggest is this: truth exists in a market like everything else. People who are empowered will always seek it out—even at high cost—if they think that the truth gives them an important edge.
If you are concerned about the death of broad access news in the United States, you might be focusing on the symptom, rather than the root cause, which is the feeling of disempowerment. Rather than bemoaning the symptom, fix the root cause. Empower the middle class politically and economically: higher quality news will follow.
This, unfortunately, makes the issue of quality journalism even more daunting than it already might seem. The implication is that in order to get good information produced and broadly consumed, we need to change how individuals relate to local and national governments. We need to empower them economically in a way that they act as invested participants and custodians. The Left and the Right might both agree with that goal, but their strategies toward that end are divergent, and only becoming more so.
This isn’t to absolve the news industry of responsibility or a sense of duty. But it means we should view the health of our news and information landscape as much as a barometer for the health of our society as it is the reverse.