The demise of newspapers, small and large, has been well chronicled—many analysts agree that more than one-third of U.S. newspapers that existed in the mid-2000s are now gone—but how this has impacted America’s most practical civil right, our right to keep and bear arms, has not often been considered.
For context, we need to realize that local newspapers are not just the minor leagues. They were—and, to a much smaller extent, still are—a counterweight to national narratives driven by elites at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and a few others.
Federalism is a concept that allows bodies of government to work in layers. The idea behind this design was to keep as much decision making as possible in local hands. Newspapers, and other local news sources, acted in much the same way. But then the ad dollars shifted to Big Tech.
Newspapers today capture only a tiny sliver of total ad dollars compared with the digital “duopoly” of Google and Meta (as well as growing shares from Amazon, TikTok, and others). While figures vary by source, it’s widely accepted that the major tech platforms now receive the majority of digital advertising revenue, and most of the growth in ad dollars since 2010 has been on digital platforms rather than in newspaper print/digital sales.
In 2000, newspapers accounted for about 53 percent of overall advertising spending, but by 2020 that share dropped to around 5 percent of total advertising spending, according to the Congressional Research Service.
As the editors and reporters in the big, urban papers are less likely to have hands-on experience with gun ownership and pro-Second Amendment points of view—partly, again, because of the rise of the elites within the big media outlets—this has shifted a larger percentage of the media away from supporting citizens’ Second Amendment-protected rights.
Incredibly, total newsroom employment in the U.S.—including reporters, editors, photographers, and videographers in newspapers, radio, television, cable, and digital news—fell about 26 percent from 2008 to 2020. That’s roughly a loss of 30,000 jobs. Newspaper newsroom employment alone plummeted much more sharply, declining about 57 percent between 2008 and 2020.
To find an industry in the last few decades that has declined by a larger percentage during this same period, one has to consider videotape rental outlets (a 98 percent decline) or one-hour photofinishing (a drop of over 90 percent).
This isn’t to say that all is being lost as local news coverage dries up. Other segments, like local digital-only news outlets, have added jobs and television newsroom employment has been relatively stable.
Meanwhile, online publications, podcasts, Substacks and more that support American freedom have been created and, in some cases, have grown massively over the last few decades.
The American media marketplace is robust, but it has been separating along ideological or party lines. This is reflective of national politics, as in the early 2000s there were many Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives who supported the individual citizen’s right to own and carry a gun; whereas today, it is hard to find them.
Meanwhile, many newsrooms—from CNN, to the Associated Press and Reuters, to newspapers that serve cities across America—look to The New York Times for how national issues, such as those related to gun control, should be covered. These newsrooms want to be in step with the cool crowd; the elites. This has pushed a lot of even local reporting to the anti-gun side.
Still, even these big papers are subject to national political changes, such as the election of President Donald Trump (R). In a telling example, the opinion pages of three big urban papers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times—have all been forced to take a trepidatious step … sideways. All three parted ways with far-Left, anti-Second Amendment editors. They did not then hire pro-freedom editors, but the pages of these newspapers have recently let a few almost-moderate views on guns get published.
As a result, the impact of these major changes in the American media landscape have thus far, and in general, contributed to a more partisan treatment of the Second Amendment.
Nevertheless, things are in flux.
In the next installment, we’ll look at the future of journalism as it relates to this fundamental right.
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