On the menu today: Well, it’s Groundhog Day . . . again. This morning the news is . . . the news business, and how mass media layoffs continue. Under our noses, the once common institution of a newspaper’s Washington bureau has become an endangered species. While the outspoken progressivism of many staffers of many publications inevitably is a factor in alienating the broader audience, we’re also witnessing a dread consequence of a world where people no longer believe it is worthwhile to pay any money to stay informed about what’s going on in their communities, states, country, or world.
There’s a good chance that you’re the exception, so God bless you, and read on.
When News Dies
If you haven’t read Sebastian Junger’s cover piece in the print magazine, “When Journalism Dies,” you should do so at the first opportunity. (Yes, this is the Junger who wrote The Perfect Storm, which was made into the movie with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.) Junger begins by clarifying what he means by journalism:
I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.
The last few years have been one hard kick in the crotch to journalism after another. The Associated Press runs through the layoffs that ended 2023 and began this year:
The news website The Messenger folded on Wednesday after being in operation since only last May, abruptly putting some 300 journalists out of work. The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 100 journalists in recent weeks, Business Insider and Time magazine announced staff cuts, Sports Illustrated is struggling to survive, the Washington Post is completing buyouts to more than 200 staffers. The Post reported Thursday that The Wall Street Journal was laying off roughly 20 people in its Washington bureau; there was no immediate comment from a Journal representative. Pitchfork announced it was no longer a freestanding music site, after digital publications BuzzFeed News and Jezebel disappeared last year.
I can hear you now, and I concur: The quality of the work produced by the Wall Street Journal and the quality of the work produced by Jezebel is so different that it feels like a categorization error to lump them together.
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Cameron Joseph detailed a massive but largely under-the-radar trend that is weakening news coverage of the federal government. It’s the steady erosion and approaching disappearance of newspapers’ Washington bureaus:
As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Shira Stein noted, these latest cuts leave just herself, two people from McClatchy, and the five people at the LA Times as the only journalists covering DC for California-based newspapers. That’s eight print reporters covering the entire federal government — for a state of thirty-nine million people.
That’s still better than much of the country. Most states don’t have a single reporter covering Washington on the ground anymore. . . .
The Tampa Bay Times, Omaha World-Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Columbus Dispatch, Denver Post, and Salt Lake Tribune all had Washington correspondents until recently, just to name a few. They’re all gone, casualties of layoffs or off to national or insider publications with more functional business models. Their desks in the Senate have been handed over to trade publications or national outlets or left as places for reporters without permanent desks to squat for a day while they cover Congress. . . .
Fully 130 local newspapers closed in 2023, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Medill Journalism School—an average of more than ten a month. Two-thirds of newspaper journalism roles have been wiped out since 2005—forty-three thousand total jobs. The industry is in free fall almost across the board: cable news organizations are laying people off in an election year (when they usually expand), NPR recently made cuts, and even the mighty Washington Post just completed a large round of buyouts.
Way back in the Mesozoic Era of my pre–National Review career, when we rode dinosaurs to work, I worked for the now-defunct States News Service, which operated as a Washington bureau for a slew of newspapers that couldn’t afford one, and also as extra manpower for the Washington bureaus of newspapers that did have one. The Boston Globe was the highest-profile newspaper that I wrote for, and back when I was there, under Jack Farrell and then Nina Easton, the Globe bureau had, I want to say, about ten full-time correspondents, all covering the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, foreign affairs, and cabinet agencies. You might think that would be enough manpower, but once a week or so, the Globe would notice some congressional hearing on fisheries regulations or whale preservation that would impact readers in its circulation area — which at that time was effectively all of New England. I’d get the call and cover the hearing, with the assignment of “figure out how this is going to affect people in New England” — and those articles always seemed to run on page A2.
I’m not saying anything I wrote was brilliant, but it reflected the dominant attitude at that time: Serve the readership by telling them things that they probably wouldn’t know about if you weren’t there to inform them. Maybe you loved what was being proposed and discussed in that hearing, maybe you hated it, but either way, you were better off knowing about it. And unless the paper sent someone to cover it, you probably wouldn’t hear anything about it. The hearings I was covering were rarely high-profile enough to even be on C-SPAN.
The desire to cover Washington may still exist, but I suspect that kind of depth and breadth of coverage is largely gone from U.S. newspapers these days. The staffers just aren’t there to do it.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to publicly cheer on the layoffs of other people, even if you’ve vehemently disliked their past work. (I’ll make an exception for certain NFL head coaches.) It certainly isn’t very Christian to take pleasure in other people’s suffering and misfortune. If you want to privately feel a sense of satisfaction and say to yourself, “Good, they had it coming,” I suppose there’s less harm in that. But what goes around comes around, and the axe comes for us all sooner or later. I don’t see why you would want to advertise to the world, via social media, that you’re the kind of person who takes glee in kicking a person when they’re down.
When you see larger-scale layoffs or buyouts at major media institutions, the management’s perception of who should stay and who should go probably won’t align with yours. The columnists whom you know, who irked you so, have a better shot at surviving the cuts because they’re well-known enough for you to have heard of them. It’s the less-known figures like the assistant city-hall reporter and the copy editors who are most likely to get the axe. That said, there’s an inverse effect, as the younger, less experienced staffers are also likely cheaper.
We, as a society, have largely chosen to stop paying for news or entertainment, with far-reaching consequences for our lives. The belief that we’re entitled to high-quality information in almost every form — and will accept lower-quality stuff if it is free — is one big reason that the current state of American discourse looks and sounds like a WWE match among insane-asylum inmates held in a sewer.
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
(Yes, this morning newsletter is free. And if you’re reading it, there’s a good chance you think it’s at least pretty good. This is because allegedly I’m good as a gateway drug to the rest of National Review. I also am pretty good at casually mentioning that a year’s subscription to the print magazine is just $35, a year’s subscription to NR Plus is just $49, and a year’s subscription to both is just $65. Oh, and the next National Review Institute cruise is to Alaska in mid June.)
I suspect that when certain conservatives hear the terms “the media” or “journalism,” their mind immediately jumps to the figures who destroyed whatever trust they had before — Dan Rather, Jayson Blair, Brian Williams, the infamous crew over at Rolling Stone — or the bomb-throwing ideologues who irk them the most — the Paul Krugmans, the Jim Acostas, the Rachel Maddows.
Note that a significant portion of the country, and its collective news audience, has an appetite for what the Krugmans, Acostas, and Maddows offer. But the world of “the media” is also populated by the likes of Andrew Ferguson, Megyn Kelly, Ross Douthat, Peggy Noonan, Yuval Levin, and a whole bunch of distinguished colleagues and former colleagues who are probably going to be irked that I didn’t mention them by name. (Notice that even in these lists, I’m throwing together columnists, podcast hosts, essayists, and researchers. The world of “the media” encompasses a lot.) Saying you don’t like “the media” is a bit like saying you don’t like communication.
Newspapers used to be extremely cheap and offered you a ton once you had that newsprint-on-paper in your hands. (The Washington Post cost a quarter until 2001 and 35 cents until 2007.) It wasn’t just the news, and in fact the news may have been a much smaller part of the appeal of a newspaper than journalists wanted to believe. Lots of readers were drawn by the comics, the sports pages, the box scores, the crossword, the horoscopes, the classifieds, the letters to the editor, the obituaries, and the coupons. Both the cover prices and subscription rates for newspapers are significantly more expensive than a decade ago, and the print editions are significantly thinner. You need a microscope to read the print in the comics pages these days.
ADDENDUM: The January 19 edition of the Morning Jolt concluded that neither Georgia nor North Carolina was likely to be a competitive swing state in the 2024 general-election cycle.
A new Fox News poll offers further evidence for that assessment in the Peach State:
Former President Donald Trump leads President Biden with just over 50% support in Georgia, a state Biden won by less than 1 point in 2020.
That’s according to a Fox News survey of Georgia registered voters released Thursday.
Just over half of Peach State voters, 51%, say they would support Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head rematch, while 43% say they’d go for Biden. That puts Trump ahead by 8 points, outside the poll’s margin of sampling error.