ABSTRACT
In 1980, there were 1,745 daily newspapers in the United States; by 2002, there were 1,457, a 17 percent drop. Newspaper readership was down 3 percent last year, with more than 3,500 newsroom jobs lost since 2000, a drop of 7 percent. The bottom-line guys are taking over from the old family-owned newspapers with traditional news values and principles, and all they care about is making money, not news. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world—the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week—it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people. Too many Americans no longer seriously read newspapers, and thus don’t have any idea what is happening in the world.
