Reporting of events in Israel from an Christian Evangelical perspective. Published in English.

Latest News

  • sWho’s Attacking Palestinian Christians? by Bassam Tawil
  • aAustralian Jewish Group Says Proposed Swastika Ban Doesn’t Go Far Enough by Benjamin Kerstein
  • Ehud Olmert: Nothing has changed since last election
  • Build, Bibi, Build by Caroline Glick
  • Local Newspapers Are Dying Because They Don’t Represent America
  • UCLA Under Investigation for Anti-Semitism by Sara Dogan
  • Expanding Settlement Construction Now Will Pay Dividends Later
  • המסע היהודי לחלל: עשר עובדות על “העולמות העליונים”
  • New Approach to Fight the New Antisemites
  • sUS seeks normalization of ties between Israel, Arab states By OMRI NAHMIAS 
  • Home
  • Evangelic, Christian
  • Politics
  • News
  • Opinions
  • Judaism
  • Art and Culture
  • Community
  • Featured
  • 929 – תנך ביחד

Local Newspapers Are Dying Because They Don’t Represent America

Feb 22, 2020 Amnon Peery Featured, Opinions 0


 

62 million Americans voted for Trump, only 6 newspapers endorsed him.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Warren Buffett started the year by dumping his portfolio of 30 newspapers in a fire sale. After having spent $344 million on a stable of local papers including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Buffalo News, and the Omaha World-Herald, the Oracle of Omaha had to let them go for a mere $140 million.

“They’re going to disappear,” Buffett said of the papers. “It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to … toast.”

In February, McClatchy, the country’s second largest local newspaper chain, the owners of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, the News & Observer, the State and many other major local papers, filed for bankruptcy.

We’re barely into 2020 and the apocalypse which wiped out 7,800 media jobs in 2019 is speeding on. That was down from the 15,000 media jobs lost in 2018, but only because it’s hard to cut jobs that don’t exist anymore. By the end of the decade, there will be no local newspapers. Only a few national ones.

The internet is certainly to blame, but digital media took nearly as bad a beating as dead tree media with the Gawker relaunch, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and many other lefty digital darlings bleeding.

On CNN, the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown claimed that the lack of local newspapers, “has contributed to the divisions that we’re experiencing around the country.”

The media has been making similar claims for a year now based on a dubious study. But the problem with the papers in the McClatchy, Gannett, Tribune, or other media stables is that they’re echoes of the same national agenda repackaged for a local audience. In the age of the internet, readers are cutting out the middleman and watching CNN or MSNBC, or reading the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Who needs a third-rate local lefty version when you can just buy access to the real lefty thing?

Local papers aren’t really local. They’re investments owned by lefty tycoons like Warren Buffett. As the investments become hopeless, they’re turning into non-profits owned by lefty tycoons like Jeff Bezos. If the local paper is just going to consist of recycled talking points from the Washington Post or the New York Times, then who needs the “local” paper? Local communities don’t. That’s why they’re dying.

The local newspaper is dead. The national media writing its eulogies long ago fired the fatal shot.

What local media markets are really missing is diversity. Vital media markets used to have dueling papers. There are fewer dueling papers and even fewer conservative ones. Of the 100 largest papers in the country, only 2 endorsed Trump in 2016. Only 6 papers endorsed Trump across the country.

It’s telling that “local” newspapers wouldn’t support a candidate that local communities voted for.

How representative are local papers when 62 million people voted for a presidential candidate who went on to win the election that only 6 papers endorsed? Who are those papers really representing?

Why would any of those 62 million people bother reading newspapers that have nothing to say them?

The 6 papers that endorsed Trump were mostly locally owned. 4 were either family-owned local papers or had a single owner. Another was a publishing group of 2 papers. Only one was a smallish media group. These are true local papers because they are locally owned and represent the local population.

The local newspaper died long ago when it vanished into the maw of national media groups which made them interchangeable. The absence of political diversity was a reflection of hiring practices that reflected the political views of national corporations, instead of the perspectives of local communities.

McClatchy is headquartered in Sacramento, California. Tribune is based out of Chicago. Gannett is run out of McLean, Virginia, less than a half hour away from Capitol Hill.

There’s nothing local about any of this.

The media groups hollowed out local papers. A single dominant local paper with national standing because of its role in a media group often functioned as a virtual monopoly for a particular area. But these miniature versions of the Washington Post weren’t widely read outside local government and business leaders. They were local chapters of a national influence operation with a bad business model.

That’s why the media is upset at the decline and fall of the corporations that controlled local news.

The media keeps insisting that local newspapers are a vital civic institution. But, as the other Marx once said, “Who wants to live in an institution?”

People invest in institutions to the extent that they reflect their values and worldview. Civic comes from the Latin ‘civis’ or citizen. Civic institutions that are not rooted in the civitas are foreign bodies. No institution that usurps the citizenry can be anything other than an engine of cultural colonialism.

Partisan civic institutions are, like the Holy Roman Empire, neither civic nor institutions. They’re the propaganda operations of a political faction which are maintained with money diverted from taxpayers and with funding from wealthy interests connected to that faction. They have no institutional future.

The Left launched its bid for power by hijacking institutions and, in doing so, destroying their legitimacy. Hijacking institutions allows radicals to temporarily wield their power at the cost of crashing the plane. That’s how the institutional legitimacy of academia, the media, and the entertainment industry died.

America is not divided because local newspapers are dying. They’re dying because they’re on one side of the divide. True institutions reflect the diversity of the civitas. False institutions reflect only themselves.

The newspaper business is much more vital and interesting in cities like New York and Boston that still have conservative papers. Discussion and debate are dynamic when there’s more than one point of view. That’s another reason why the people who used to read newspapers moved on to the internet.

The media is an echo chamber. A false institution that does not listen to the citizenry, only hectors it.

And the voice of its echo chamber is losing power.

Trump won even though only a handful of papers endorsed him. He won the White House over the opposition of the big media conglomerates that are racing each to bankruptcy court.

The media makes much of its endorsements. But how much do they really matter?

In one survey 69% of Americans said that a newspaper endorsement of a candidate would have no impact on their vote. 14% said that it would make them more likely to vote for and 14% more likely to vote against. Newspaper endorsements of political candidates couldn’t possibly matter any less.

An older survey however noted that endorsements by “independently owned papers seemed to influence readers more than larger and group-owned papers”.

True local newspapers can still be trusted. Conglomerate papers posing as local aren’t.

Local papers were once local. When they went national, they stopped being civic institutions. The lack of endorsements for Trump and the lack of political diversity are symptoms of the problem. When newspapers became a partisan institution, they stopped being relevant to the lives of much of the country. And they also stopped being interesting even to those readers who agreed with their politics.

As Buffett put it, they “went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to … toast.”

Trying to subsidize them as non-profits with tech money from Silicon Valley, as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are doing, won’t change that. Take it from Warren Buffett who lost a fortune trying.

 Share


  • tweet
Build, Bibi, Build by Caroline Glick UCLA Under Investigation for Anti-Semitism by Sara Dogan

Related articles
  • sWho’s Attacking Palestinian Christians? by Bassam Tawil
    sWho’s Attacking Palestinian...

    Mar 08, 2020 0

  • aAustralian Jewish Group Says Proposed Swastika Ban Doesn’t Go Far Enough by Benjamin Kerstein
    aAustralian Jewish Group Says Proposed...

    Feb 26, 2020 0

  • Ehud Olmert: Nothing has changed since last election
    Ehud Olmert: Nothing has changed since...

    Feb 23, 2020 0

  • Build, Bibi, Build by Caroline Glick
    Build, Bibi, Build by Caroline Glick

    Feb 22, 2020 0

More in this category
  • aAustralian Jewish Group Says Proposed Swastika Ban Doesn’t Go Far Enough by Benjamin Kerstein
    aAustralian Jewish Group Says Proposed...

    Feb 26, 2020 0

  • Ehud Olmert: Nothing has changed since last election
    Ehud Olmert: Nothing has changed since...

    Feb 23, 2020 0

  • UCLA Under Investigation for Anti-Semitism by Sara Dogan
    UCLA Under Investigation for...

    Feb 22, 2020 0

  • Expanding Settlement Construction Now Will Pay Dividends Later
    Expanding Settlement Construction Now...

    Feb 19, 2020 0


Your Comment/התגובה שלך Cancel reply

Search Our Site

OUR SITES אתרי מבט

 

 

 

Mabat Digitalic

Follow Us!

Today’s Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=67&v=vjq7Cha_Rpk

Poland’s forgotten civil strife and the struggle for Jewish statehood

Menachem Begin in December 1942 wearing the Polish Army uniform of Gen. Anders’ forces with his wife Aliza and David Yutan; (back row) Moshe Stein and Israel Epstein

(photo credit: JABOTINSKY ARCHIVES)

During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park on January 24, 2020, before the climax of Holocaust remembrance events at which Russian President Vladimir Putin was given a central platform, we were stunned to hear a rendition of The Blue Kerchief (Siniy

Read more

Belgian carnival to double down on antisemitic displays

Giant figures are seen during the 87th carnival parade of Aalst February 15, 2015

The annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium, is expected to take place on Sunday with even more antisemitic elements than in previous years.
Aalst’s organizers have sold hundreds of “rabbi kits” for revelers to dress as hassidic Jews in the carnival’s parade. The kit includes oversized noses, sidelocks (peyot) and black hats. The organizers plan to bring back floats similar to the one displayed in 2019 featuring oversized dolls of Jews, with rats on their shoulders, holding banknotes.

Read more

Pope Appears to Give Thumbs Down to Trump’s Mideast Peace Plan

Pope Francis waves as he arrives at the Basilica of Saint Nicholas in the southern Italian coastal city of Bari, Italy February 23, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli.

Pope Francis on Sunday warned against “inequitable solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying they would only be a prelude to new crises, in an apparent reference to US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace proposal.

Francis made his comments in the southern Italian port city of Bari, where he traveled to conclude a meeting of bishops from all countries in the Mediterranean basin.

Read more

Israel, Palestinian Authority Agree to End Trade Dispute: Officials

Palestinians walk past a shop selling fruits in Ramallah, Feb. 20, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have reached an agreement to end a five-month long trade dispute, officials said on Thursday.

The dispute, which opened a new front in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began in September when the PA announced a boycott of Israel calves. The PA exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank under interim peace deals.

Read more

Disturbing Images Emerge of Astounding Antisemitism at Belgian Carnival

Antisemitic caricatures on display at the annual carnival in Aalst, Belgium. Photo: Raphael Ahren via Twitter.

Disturbing images emerged on Sunday of the annual carnival at Aalst, Belgium, showing an astounding number of antisemitic themes, costumes, displays and statements.

Israeli journalist Raphael Ahren documented people dressed as caricatures of Orthodox Jews, a fake “wailing wall” attacking critics of the parade, blatantly antisemitic characters and puppets wearing traditional Jewish clothes and sporting huge noses.

Read more

News

sUS seeks normalization of ties between Israel, Arab states By OMRI NAHMIAS 

sUS seeks normalization of ties between Israel, Arab states By OMRI...

Feb 02, 2020 0

The remarks from the US official came in wake of the Palestinian decision to reject the administration’s peace plan. US PRESIDENT Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive to...
Read More
P     Peace plan is biggest diplomatic gift US ever gave Israel (Editorial)

P Peace plan is biggest diplomatic gift US...

Jan 31, 2020 0

Jan 28, 2020 0

Germany’s Selective Fight against Anti-Semitism by Judith Bergman

Germany’s Selective Fight against...

Jan 28, 2020 0

NYPD Cops Who Captured Accused Monsey Hanukkah Party Stabber Awarded Honors

NYPD Cops Who Captured Accused Monsey Hanukkah...

Jan 21, 2020 0

New column!

KEN COHEN :UN Sinks to a New Low with BDS-Inspired Blacklist

The stench of anti-Semitism always hovers over Switzerland’s Lake Geneva when the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is meeting there. The foul emanations reached a new nadir last week with UNHRC’s publication of a “database” of companies doing business in the disputed territories in Israel.

Following the publication of the list, Bruno Stagno Ugarte, deputy director for advocacy of NGO Human Rights Watch, stated, “The long-awaited release of the U.N. settlement business database should put all companies on notice: To do business with illegal settlements [sic] is to aid in the commission of war crimes.”

Read More

David Suissa : Bad Globalism: China Controls our Meds

One of the many things that annoys me about politicians is how sure they are of themselves. Everything is black and white. Every idea is good or bad. Take globalism, for example. You either love it or hate it. It works or it doesn’t.

Another thing that annoys me is how so much of a politician’s life revolves around power: Do everything you can to get it, and everything you can to keep it.

Why am I ranting? Because, while our politicians have been consumed with power and the media with the fights over power, a threat to our nation has been virtually ignored.

Read More

Alex Traiman : Challengers Gantz and Lapid Attack Netanyahu-Trump Relationship

Blue and White Party leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid are establishing their diplomatic credentials in the immediate run-up to Israel’s March 2 election with an insult to a U.S. administration that has arguably provided Israel with more diplomatic gains than any previous administration.

The Times of Israel reported that at a campaign stop in front of English-speaking Israelis, Gantz accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “of neglecting bipartisan ties in favor of exclusive support from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” under the headline “Gantz pledges to mend ties with U.S. Democrats if elected.”

Read More

CLIFFORD D. MAY : The Return of the Monroe Doctrine

Bipartisanship was in short supply at the State of the Union address earlier this month—with one notable exception.

Nancy Pelosi had been looking dyspeptic, shuffling the papers she would later rip to shreds, when President Donald Trump reminded his audience that “the United States is leading a 59-nation diplomatic coalition against the socialist dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.”

Suddenly, the House Speaker applauded. Trump then introduced “the true and legitimate president of Venezuela: Juan Guaidó.”

Read More

Melanie Phillips : Sanitizing Soros through Guilt by Association

The law professor Alan Dershowitz has thrown a legal hand-grenade into America’s political civil war by claiming to have evidence that former President Barack Obama “personally asked” the FBI to investigate someone “on behalf” of Obama’s “close ally,” billionaire financier George Soros.

He made his cryptic remark in an interview defending U.S. President Donald Trump against claims he interfered in the prosecution of his former adviser, Roger Stone.

Read More

Categories

RSS News

  • Israeli researchers discover new bee species
  • Watch: Biden snaps at reporter
  • Fauci: We're going to be completely transparent
  • Israeli medical workers protest government handling of pandemic
  • Multiple religious Zionist leaders meet with deputy AG over Sandak investigation

Today’s Video

Archives

Copyright 2020 | MabatZion.com | All rights reserved