The flatlining of journalism, and the reign of triviality
Since actual humanities education has also withered away, knowledge and wisdom don't hold much sway anymore
The piece I excerpt immediately below is by no means the only one out there about this subject, but it’s pretty succinct and comprehensive in the way it covers it:
Even by the standards of a news business whose fortunes have plummeted in the digital age, the last few weeks have been especially grim for American journalism.
Prominent newspapers like The Washington Post are shedding reporters and editors, and on Tuesday, The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 20 percent of its newsroom. Cable news ratings have fallen amid an uncompetitive presidential primary contest. Esteemed titles like Sports Illustrated, already a shadow of their former selves, have been gutted overnight.
As Americans prepare for an election year that will feature disinformation wars, A.I.-generated agitprop and a debate over the future of democracy, the mainstream news industry — once the de facto watchdog and facilitator of public discourse — is struggling to stay afloat.
The pain is particularly pronounced at the community level. An average of five local newspapers are closing every two weeks, according Northwestern University’s Medill School, with more half of all American counties now so-called news deserts with limited access to news about their hometowns. Of 1,100 public radio stations and affiliates, only about one in five is producing local journalism.
“At a time when America arguably needs more solid news coverage than ever, it is very disturbing to see economic forces arrange so powerfully against traditional news sources,” said Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president who works with a group of M.I.T. researchers studying the future of news and information.
“It’s not just disturbing,” he added. “It’s dangerous.”
I have first-had experience with this. While Precipice and my contributions to publications like The Freemen News-letter and Ordinary Times are the favorite type of writing I do, the bread and butter has, for the last few years, been features for the array of magazines published by the media company that owns our hometown newspaper and several others nearby. (I’m here going to point out that if you like Precipice content and would like to see that comprise a greater portion of how I pay the bills, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Thanks in advance.) Said hometown paper recently went from being a daily to putting out twice-weekly print editions, and doesn’t put fresh stories online in between. Some of the magazines have gone from a bimonthly basis to quarterly.
All kinds of factors are involved, but I feel confident in offering post-Americans’ increasing fondness for distraction as a major one. Consider the front page of the Drudge Report, still a pretty balanced compendium of daily stories from a variety of sources, for instance. Stories about Taylor Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs fans are presented on an equal footing with NATO warnings about probable war with Russia. We consume amusement and expend our attention bandwidths on celebrity doings, often without giving a thought for days or months to the erosion of the post-1945 international order, and the implications of that for our personal lives (and there will be implications).
But it’s understandable that we should no longer give a diddly about stuff like global security.
Consider what’s happened to the humanities departments of our colleges and universities. You can get an English degree from Yale without ever taking a Shakespeare course. Philosophy and history majors have plummeted.
Post-Americans - indeed, post-Westerners generally - no longer think about questions like what makes a human life worth living, how to define concepts like nobility, dignity, freedom or beauty, or how to organize a society in a way conducive to human flourishing, much less seek out the minds from our past who have grappled with them in serious ways.
It’s no wonder we lack gauges for determining what is important, what’s worthy of our attention.
Consequently, we’re, as I put it in the title of a recent post here, flooring it in the direction of our inexorable grim juncture. Hell, polls show most of us don’t want the presidential-candidate choice we’e going to be saddled with in November.
It would be one thing if online information sources were taking over the role previously handled by legacy media, but the new landscape seems to be characterized by an oh-looky-at-the-shiny-object-over-there ethos.
The day will be arriving when a jarring event of some sort will motivate us to ponder those big questions alluded to above. But we’ll probably only have minutes to do so at most.