According to their report, "The Declining Value Of U.S. Newspapers," just three different media companies in 2014 alone decided to dump more than 100 newspaper properties. Pew said the companies spun off the money-losing properties "in large part to protect their still-robust broadcast or digital divisions."
The Daily News, on the block since February, has yet to be sold and is now being eyed by Captiol Hill's newspaper The Hill, which may turn it into a digital operation like the Washington Examiner, Huffington Post, Brietbart and the Daily Caller.
The Pew report is short and very unsweet:
Over the past two decades, major newspapers across the country have seen a recurring cycle of ownership changes and steep declines in value.
The San Diego Union-Tribune was the latest example of this, as it officially changed ownership hands Thursday for the third time in six years. This most recent purchase came from Tribune Publishing Co. for the amount of $85 million (including nine community papers). Still waiting for a buyer is the 96-year-old New York tabloid the Daily News, which owner Mort Zuckerman put on the sale block this spring. But there seems to be far from a stampede of interested buyers.
Steep revenue and circulation declines across the newspaper industry have left many newspapers struggling. Over the past decade, weekday circulation has fallen 17% and ad revenue more than 50%. In 2014 alone, three different media companies decided to spin off more than 100 newspaper properties, in large part to protect their still-robust broadcast or digital divisions.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos may have stunned many with his $250 million purchase of The Washington Post, which was last sold at auction in 1933, but other recent sales of major papers show dramatic devaluation and suggest a tough road ahead for the newspaper industry.
At a White House meeting with President Ronald Reagan in February 1981, former CIA Director William Casey said, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
And so it came to pass, and so the US media, and US government itself, lost their legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
Only fools believe the propaganda catapulted by the major US newspapers and mass media disinformation channels, and almost all metro newspapers and independent TV stations have all but stopped trying to cover actual news except local crime, traffic accidents, politics and business or community affairs. Now national news is sports or entertainment.
The CIA's "mighty Wurlitzer", along with Rupert Murdoch's poisonous Faux News 'journalism', have largely taken over US media, and it's instructively ironic that the prominent exceptions are broadcast on The Comedy Channel.