On the morning after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton met the press, and at one point as she evaluated her loss to Donald Trump, she said, “It’s going to take a long time to get over this.” And so it remains, eight years later, our task to deal with the Trump era.
Last week’s voting marked the 19th presidential election of my lifetime – though I don’t remember the one that put General Eisenhower in the White House. I do recall standing on the trunk of the family Buick in 1960 to get a view of Richard Nixon as he whistle-stopped through my Illinois hometown – literally: He hopped off the back of a train to make a speech, just like politicians of decades earlier. It didn’t get him elected: John Kennedy’s win in Illinois gave him the electoral votes he needed to claim the presidency. But it did excite the interest of a patriotic little kid, which is why I’m talking with you today about our democracy.
And what I need to say, as someone whose career in journalism was focused on government and politics, is that we’re in trouble. The election results leave me worried about the ability of citizens to make thoughtful choices as they approach voting. It’s not that people are apathetic – far from it, in fact. It’s the one good thing that I can say about Donald Trump: he brings people to the polls, whether they are enthusiastic supporters or terrified opponents. He excites public interest. There: I’ve said something good about Trump. Don’t expect any more.
But that is also a mark of what’s troubling us: We are attracted to the unusual – the bizarre, even – and that distracts us from the important issues that ought to be the basis of our votes. Over the past few weeks, every time I heard a pundit declare that one of the challenges for the candidacy of Kamala Harris was that voters didn’t know what she stood for, I wanted to shout, “Just pay attention, folks! The information is all out there.”
But Americans are paying less attention to the news than they used to. You folks who are listening on public radio are quite the exception – but there are fewer of you than there used to be. A recent analysis found that the number of people who listen to public radio news stations in a week has dropped by almost one-quarter over just the past five years.
Newspapers were ahead of the curve there – which I’m sad to say, as a guy who spent about a quarter century as a newspaper editor. People aren’t reading anymore. The average time an American spent reading a newspaper last year was one minute and thirty seconds – a 43 percent drop from 2014. And over the past 20 years, 2,100 newspapers have closed in America; we lost two and a half newspapers a week last year.
As for TV, one-third of Americans say they prefer to get local news on television – which is fine, except that means the local TV audience has dropped by 15 percent in just five years. And it continues to fall.
Yes, folks are mainly getting their news from digital sources – but where do you think the real news online comes from? It’s from those legacy media outlets, mostly. And what people consider news might not be the stuff that propels democracy. I’m a Taylor Swift fan, but her social life does not strike me as an important story. And while a podcaster’s rant is media content – and the sort of thing that draws the attention of millions these days – it is not news.
Overall, when people were asked a couple of years ago how much attention they paid to the news, 38 percent of adults claimed to follow the news closely – down from 51 percent in 2016 – but, honestly, I think some folks fibbed a bit when they were asked.
Even if that’s true, it means that more than six in 10 adults don’t follow the news very closely. That helps explain why so many millions of people seem to vote against their own best interests – and in the case of this year’s race, why they disregarded the dire warnings of national security officials and economists and thoughtful people all over the country about the danger that Donald Trump’s return to power would represent.
The hard truth is that the responsible news media has lost so much of its audience that it can rarely function as an effective watchdog on government, and can no longer drive debate about the course of our democracy. Donald Trump showed in winning the White House again that there is a new media ecosystem in power, one that cares less about facts and truth, but that eagerly reinforces the biases of its audiences. Honestly, I don’t know quite how to counter that influence.
But I will say this: In what is without doubt a dark time for fact-based media, we need to support the truth-tellers of American journalism. Now, more than ever before, we will need them.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.