The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Notebook: I’ve never been the most loyal reader of the Washington Post, but I’ve cherished it over the years, whenever I could get my hands on it, even in the last few years, as it was part of my PressReader subscription, if fitfully so (you never knew whether you’d get your day’s issue, and the Sunday issue has always been blacked out). Good reporting, fairly OK writing, the occasional surprise on the OpEd page, and a respectable opinion section handled by David Shipler, the solid former New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem and the author of The Working Poor, a 2004, denser addition to Ehrenreich’s incomparable Nickle and Dimed The Rights of the People (2011), Rights at Risk (2012), and what I think remains his best book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land,  from 1986. It is less outdated than you’d think: adjust with a few massacres and you’re current. Shipler couldn’t stay on after Bezos ordered that about-face at the Post’s opinion page, telling Shipler (literally, apparently) that if Shipler wasn’t a “hell yes” for it. he’d better leave. So Bezos, priming himself to find new ways to toady to Trump, wants the Post to be a third-rate copy of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages. McKay Coppins in the November 2021 Atlantic had a piece on the killing of America’s newspapers by Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund. Bezos wasn’t among the culprits back then, what with his “Democracy dies in darkness” adorning the Post after Trump’s first election and before he transitioned to a fascist in sheep’s clothing. But there was this paragraph: “But beneath all the recriminations and infighting was a cruel reality: When faced with the likely decimation of the country’s largest local newspapers, most Americans didn’t seem to care very much. “It was like watching a slow-motion disaster,” says Gregory Pratt, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.” So it is. Newspapers are dying because democracy is dying, and enough Americans don’t seem to care very much.

—P.T.

XXX

 

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The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, and the number is almost certain to grow. […] The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self. […] This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.

–From “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms: Inside Alden Global Capital,” by By McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, November 2021.

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