The death of newspapers. The death of advertising. The death
of democracy. Yikes, that last one seems all too real these days. There always seems
to be somebody pedaling the “death” or “end” of something,
largely to sell books, speeches, media appearances or ideologies. I mean, how ridiculous
do the naïve claims in 2008 of a “post racial America” and the "death of racism" sound in today’s cauldron of racial hatred?
Remember the pronouncements in the late ‘90s and early 2000s that newspapers and magazines were dead? Well, many of them are actually flourishing. Check out the weekly Monocle 24 podcast “The Stack” (https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/), which focuses on today’s thriving world of print publishing. There is no question that smaller newspapers and general interest magazines have struggled and even perished, but rarely have we seen the kind of renaissance in newspaper journalism among the nation’s leading publications than is apparent today. And rarely have we needed serious print journalism more than at this very moment.
Will U.S. democracy die, as some are claiming these days? Absolutely not. Principles of democracy, liberty, equality and even decency are clearly under attack right now. They are willfully being diminished by an Oval Office grotesquerie. It will take years to recover from this horrid chapter in our history, but recover we will.
Sure, many industries have died and are dying because their time had come and gone. The steam engine, telegraph, coal mining, video rental and recordable media businesses come to mind. That’s a normal albeit painful feature of economics. In general, however, broad declarations of the death of something should always be carefully considered. Ask yourself in these situations, who is trying to sell me something and why?
As Mark Twain once declared about declarations of his own demise, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Yes, that’s the exact quote. It seems that Twain’s utterance like so many other quotations has long suffered from the death of accuracy.
Remember the pronouncements in the late ‘90s and early 2000s that newspapers and magazines were dead? Well, many of them are actually flourishing. Check out the weekly Monocle 24 podcast “The Stack” (https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/), which focuses on today’s thriving world of print publishing. There is no question that smaller newspapers and general interest magazines have struggled and even perished, but rarely have we seen the kind of renaissance in newspaper journalism among the nation’s leading publications than is apparent today. And rarely have we needed serious print journalism more than at this very moment.
Will U.S. democracy die, as some are claiming these days? Absolutely not. Principles of democracy, liberty, equality and even decency are clearly under attack right now. They are willfully being diminished by an Oval Office grotesquerie. It will take years to recover from this horrid chapter in our history, but recover we will.
Sure, many industries have died and are dying because their time had come and gone. The steam engine, telegraph, coal mining, video rental and recordable media businesses come to mind. That’s a normal albeit painful feature of economics. In general, however, broad declarations of the death of something should always be carefully considered. Ask yourself in these situations, who is trying to sell me something and why?
As Mark Twain once declared about declarations of his own demise, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Yes, that’s the exact quote. It seems that Twain’s utterance like so many other quotations has long suffered from the death of accuracy.
