American Thinker

by Micheal S. Parkhurst

    Once upon a time, when people lived in small towns, the news arrived on foot.

    First came the traveling minstrels, who carried word from village to village at the speed of their own walking or the pace of a horse. The minstrel was more than a messenger; he was the one who gathered the news and edited it for the listening pleasure of his audience. Because he traveled so slowly, word could take weeks to cross a country, and because a single man could hold only so much in his memory, the volume stayed small. Trivial or unimportant matters were screened out quickly. Then came the town crier, who stood in the square and made the announcements, though someone else still gathered and shaped what he read aloud.

    The printing press changed everything. Now nothing had to be memorized at all; the crier made his announcements while another man gathered and edited the content. Once enough people could read for themselves and the cost of printing had fallen far enough, the newspapers took over, and for the first time, the sources of news competed with for an audience. Carried by horseback, that day’s events could reach even remote villages from dozens of miles away, and national news could be had within a few days. What everyone took for granted was that the gathering of it was both truthful and accurate — and in the minstrel’s day, that trust was earned plainly, for other travelers could verify a story, and the minstrel himself had to appear trustworthy or lose his welcome.

    Radio and, later, live television let us witness events firsthand and on a global scale. But that reach came at a price: The volume of information grew so oceanic that we had no choice but to depend on the editors who selected it, or else drown in it. Our habits and routines decided when and how we took the news in from the radio while driving, from the television over breakfast or dinner, from the paper on the weekend — and the sources we chose were still largely regional. Those editors held tremendous power to shape a society, by what they chose to leave out as much as by how they slanted what remained.

    Cable television threw off the old rhythm entirely. The evening broadcast and the morning paper had at least imposed a schedule — an editor’s judgment about what the day amounted to. The twenty-four-hour news channel had no such discipline. It had airtime to fill and, for most of the day, nothing to fill it with, so it learned to manufacture urgency: The “breaking news” banner hung over a story that had not changed in six hours; the panel of paid opinion assembled to argue, because argument is cheaper than reporting. The audience was no longer regional. A viewer in a small town now watched the same national feed as everyone else, and the local paper, which had once been the only voice that knew the name of the county supervisor, began to starve.

    Then the internet removed the last of the friction. The printing press had lowered the cost of copying; the network lowered it to nothing. Anyone with a keyboard became a publisher, and the barrier that had made the editor powerful — the sheer expense of reaching an audience — evaporated. At first, this looked like liberation. The gatekeeper who could bury a story by leaving it out no longer held the gate, because there was no longer a single gate to hold. But the same collapse that freed the reader also drowned him. The oceanic volume I worried about in the age of television became a flood past any hope of measure, and a man standing waist-deep in information is no better informed than one standing in a desert.

    Social media finished the transformation. The feed did not merely carry the news; it selected it, and it selected not for truth or importance, but for engagement — for whatever held the eye a moment longer, whatever provoked the sharpest reaction. The algorithm learned quickly that outrage travels faster than fact and that a comforting lie, handed to a reader who already believes it, will always outperform an uncomfortable truth. The old mechanism of trust — the fellow traveler who could vouch for the minstrel’s story, the rival papers who kept one another honest — was gone, and in its place stood a machine engineered to tell each of us precisely what we already wished to hear.

    Here is the bitter irony. The newspapers, having lost their advertising to the platforms that displaced them, found themselves fighting for survival in an economy that paid for attention and not for accuracy. So they did what desperate men have always done: They reached back to the yellow journalism of a century ago, the sensational headline and the manufactured scandal that once sold papers by the armful on street corners. They made it the whole of their business. What was once the disreputable fringe of the trade has become the overwhelming majority of its content.

    Worse still, nearly every legacy paper and broadcaster has chosen a political side. They no longer report the world; they curate it. Each has settled upon an ideological position and now assembles, out of the day’s boundless supply of events, only those facts that flatter its chosen view and only those silences that protect it. The editor’s ancient power to shape a whole society by what he chooses to leave out has not diminished in the slightest. It has been perfected, and then deliberately aimed.

    So when I say newspapers are dead, I do not mean the paper object, which still lands on a few doorsteps, nor the broadcast, which still fills the dinner hour. Those persist well enough. What has died is the thing that gave them their worth: the shared assumption, carried unbroken from the minstrel to the morning edition, that whoever gathered the news had gathered it honestly, and that what finally reached us was both truthful and accurate. That trust is what made a newspaper a newspaper. It is gone, and no banner, no masthead, no anchor’s practiced gravity will bring it back. What remains merely wears the costume of the institution while performing the opposite of its purpose.

    Image via Pxhere.