George Will Dares to Expound on ‘How the Media Polarized Us’
5th August 2022
George Will almost sounded like a conservative columnist again in Thursday’s Washington Post. The headline was “How the economics of news altered the news itself.” Will was promoting as “newsworthy” an article titled “How the Media Polarized Us” by Andrey Mir in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
In his article, Mir blames the rise of the internet for depriving newspapers of advertising revenue. Classified advertising collapsed. Corporate advertisers realized Google was much better at targeting their potential customers. In 2000, advertisers gave newspapers $19.6 billion — about a third of papers’ revenue. In 2013, Google’s $51 billion in ad revenues eclipsed American newspapers’ total ad revenues of $23 billion. By 2018, revenue from the classifieds was just $2.2 billion.
So their business model shifted to rely on readers rather than advertisers. Mir asserts they went from journalism to “post-journalism,” by which the media elite supply not news but “news validation.”