By David Brooks on June 30, 2025
Source: Northwestern Now
In the United States, it is estimated that one-third of all newspapers that existed in 2005 have disappeared. Of the approximately 6,000 newspapers that still survive in this country, more than two perish each week, and a majority have had to stop publishing daily to continue only as weeklies.
Newsrooms have suffered massive cutbacks. There was a 70% drop between 2006 and 2021 in the number of workers in the newspaper industry in the United States; the number of newsroom employees fell by more than half, from 75,000 to less than 30,000 during that period. As a result, there are what are called news deserts in communities and even regions across the country, which has benefited the US right wing. And this picture extends, to varying degrees, throughout the world.
Among the factors leading to this crisis is the digital transition in the media sector. The traditional business model, which revolved around advertising revenue, billboards, and timely reporting, is no longer viable in the digital age. The great challenge for the media in the last three decades has been how to navigate the digital sea.
But beyond the new technological era and its implications for news media, the crisis in journalism is largely due to forces and people outside journalism who are willing, for reasons of corporate greed or political gamesmanship, to sacrifice a newspaper or a media outlet.
On the one hand, businesspeople and investors whose primary interest is not journalism but business impose a market strategy that leads to disaster for newspapers large and small. Media outlets are acquired by businesspeople as if they were just another investment and subjected to the utterly illiterate logic of Wall Street, where the only thing that matters is profits and returns for investors.
And to squeeze out financial benefits, drastic cuts are made to reporters, photographers, editors, cartoonists, designers, copywriters, and more—to reduce costs—which inevitably decimates the quality of the media and, with it, its audience, until it is driven to suicide.
Another factor in this crisis is political interests, which seek to use journalism for their own agendas, sometimes in combination with business interests. In this country, this is clearly illustrated by the relationship between the media and Trump. Large companies such as The Washington Post and the parent companies of CBS and ABC News, among others, are sacrificing their journalism for business and/or political interests in the face of a president who accuses, harasses, and threatens them for his own political ends.
They all justify their games with journalism with grand phrases such as the defense of principles such as freedom of expression. But they are very flexible in private and, in effect, act as Groucho Marx said: These are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I have others.
Therefore, the greatest challenge for independent journalists and newspapers is to defend the fundamental principles and purpose of the media.
No one becomes a journalist to get rich, climb the social ladder, or become a businessman. Good, independent journalism, in its essence, has a mission to seek the truth, hold power to account, give voice to the unheard, and tell the story of each day. Newspapers that fulfill this mission should be seen as a public good with a moral purpose, says Alan Rusbridger, journalist and former editor of The Guardian.
Those who seek to reduce a good newspaper to just another business or another tool in some political game are undermining a collective effort dedicated to something more important than profits and personal power.
Galeano wrote: “Scientists say we are made of atoms, but a little bird told me we are made of stories.” Telling them truthfully and lovingly, and weaving them into a shared story—not as products to be sold or as part of a political game—is journalism.
David Brooks is a Mexican journalist, correspondent for the newspaper La Jornada in the United States.
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English