The 4th Estate's Crisis and its Consequences

Do you recall who said, “Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers”?

Well, Bunkie, it was Will Rogers, as quoted in The New York Times, September 30, 1923 (according to sources).

What became Rogers’ trademark quip has become famous, probably because of its simplicity and because millions of Americans could say the same, particularly in the 20th century before television news — as a poor journalistic cousin — became a main source of news and information.

Of course, things are never as simple as they seem, and the entire Times quote probably was “All I know is what I read in the newspapers and see with my own eyes as I wander from hither to thither.” Which, on reflection, makes more sense as something said by the eminently sensible Rogers.

Most people who have been paying attention know that in addition to television news’s popularity, there’s been a world of things negatively affecting America’s newspapers in the 85-plus years since Rogers’ self-deprecating and mildly sarcastic remark concerning newspapers and their keeping people informed — or not — was in The Times. They include declining readership because of television news — and now the Internet — and an overall decline in Americans reading anything, for that matter.

In recent years, paid subscriptions and advertising revenue have fallen and basic costs have increased. And many newspapers, now owned by big national chains whose corporate masters too often are much more interested in a fat bottom line than in good journalism, have become near-empty shells of what they once were. Now, George W. Bush and the Republicans’ Great Recession have pushed the newspaper industry in general into an Edgar Allen Poe-style vortex, with many newspapers facing House of Usher-style ruination.

Americans who think we can do without newspapers apparently don’t seem to realize that real reporting about what is going on that affects them has its roots in newspaper reporting — that television news generally tags along after the newspaper watchdog — that so-called Internet news (aside from newspapers’ websites) mostly picks up scraps of what the newspaper watchdogs dig up — that most local and state news of consequence originates with newspapers — that newspapers have been and will continue to be the principal watchdogs that smell out and dig up and confront excesses and corruption and misfeasance and malfeasance in business and industry and government and other segments of society.

What Thomas Jefferson said is as true today as it was more than 200 years ago.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”