Can America save democracy when no one is even reading about it?

“Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

That’s pretty much what I hear from my legion of right-wing trolls every time I post a new column link on X/Twitter, but this time the words didn’t come from @ben94756387 from St. Petersburg. Instead, this was uttered by Will Lewis, the controversial Brit whom one of Earth’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, brought in as publisher of his Washington Post — the storied newspaper whose investigative journalism brought down a president and became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

Lewis’ blunt lecture in announcing a radical shake-up at the Post to a room of unhappy journalists was kind of obnoxious (he also implied Americans are too dumb to know what penultimate means), but it wasn’t wrong. A decade after the owner who made Amazon into the 800-pound gorilla of American capitalism took his talents inside the Beltway, Bezos’ Post reportedly lost a whopping $77 million last year. Just as Lewis said, the Post has lost about half its once-sizable digital readership since 2020, undoing a temporary surge during Donald Trump’s nightmare presidency.

The radical shake-up Lewis announced for the Post was highlighted by a so-called third newsroom, tasked with finding ways to reach the millions of Americans, and especially young people, who get most of their information from social media sites like TikTok, if they get any information at all. But it had the feel of a Hail Mary pass in an annus horribilis for the American news media that began with a wave of layoffs, buyouts, and more closures. (My own newsroom at The Inquirer has, sadly, not been immune.) So, have we now hit rock bottom?

Not even close.

As we begin a new hurricane season, the American news media is like a Shore house that’s been battered by the 100 mph winds of digital change and is about to get totally swamped by a storm surge known as artificial intelligence, or AI. Last month, with some fanfare in the tech world but less attention among everyday consumers, the world-dominant search engine Google introduced a change in which a growing number of online searches are prompting Google AI-generated answers, overpowering links to traditional publishers like the Post, The Inquirer, or Yahoo News.

“Website traffic will heavily suffer,” financier Cloris Chen recently told the Observer, which cited media industry studies that web traffic from search could plunge an astronomical 90%. Remember, this would come on top of the 2020s drop in readership cited by the Post and other news organizations. When the internet took off in the late 1990s, there was a popular saying: “Content is king.” Although newsroom leaders were caught flat-footed by this newfangled World Wide Web, there was also a sense that Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Twitter needed something, written by journalists and their non-artificial intelligence, to actually link to.

This delicate and often awkward dance lasted for 25 years — until it ended with a body slam. When the music stops, Google is a capitalist corporation that makes more money keeping readers on its site, exposed to its advertisers, than by sending them to someone else. And its Gemini AI tool has given it the means to do exactly that. The same holds for Facebook, which also changed its algorithms and deemphasized news links last year after the platform signaled that its relationship with journalism in a world of growing disinformation wasn’t worth the headache. Ditto for Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter: The site encourages paid users to write longer posts so you won’t leave it.

I can’t sugarcoat it: American newsrooms are staring into the darkness of a death spiral. These are the same newsrooms that hire human journalists who investigate why your new mayor pays her top aides so much, keep an eye on how City Hall and the cops are treating the powerless, and wonder why your bus terminal is a mess. The free press our founders enshrined in the Bill of Rights might be experiencing its penultimate moment, if you know what I mean. The one newsroom that apparently made a big profit last year was the Epoch Times — and that was through an allegedly criminal money laundering scheme.

A perfect storm happens for more than one reason. For one thing, even before the Google AI and Facebook crises, traditional journalism — still under the sway of newsroom leaders who came up with a (supposedly) objective, voice-of-God tone that was empowered by newspapers’ 20th-century monopoly — seems ill-suited to a 21st century in which young people clamor for the visual vibe of Instagram and rapid-fire, highly opinionated world of TikTok. In the fast-food nation of today’s social media, a legacy publisher can taste like kale. This inherent culture clash makes me dubious that Lewis’ youth-oriented “third newsroom” at the Post can succeed.

The other problem is that, in a nearly impossible environment, newsroom leadership would have to hold an almost perfect vision for steering through the immediate crisis and imagining a brighter future. And the current crop of top editors feels like anything but. Exhibit A is the New York Times, which has used its (ironically) Amazon-like grip as the “category killer” of U.S. journalism to actually grow its digital audience, but serves this mass audience an unappealing gruel of forced objectivity in which Trump can be portrayed as a hypermasculine outlaw, and not the would-be dictator who might prosecute the Times’ top editors if elected in November.

So far, the one new idea in 2024 has been to import a lot of top British white guy journalists: the Post publisher Lewis and his new top editor from the U.K.’s right-wing Telegraph, scandalized by phone hacking and paying sources, as well as new English leaders at the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and even CNN. The British Invasion of 1964 — the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals — was awesome, but this 2024 version feels off-key. I suspect these newer boy bands of editors will be just as befuddled by TikTok as the Americans they replaced but with a more posh-sounding accent. At least they’ll bring a better understanding of monarchy to U.S. newsrooms after Jan. 20, 2025.

» READ MORE: Biden losing with voters who get their news from nowhere | Will Bunch Newsletter

Many praised, and some mocked, the Post’s post-Trump motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” In this year’s election season, American liberty and the light of journalism are fast fading in tandem. The media’s implosion is creating a vacuum to be filled by a growing pool of disinformation — some of it for profit, like Fox News and the rural umbrella of talk radio, and some of it foreign propaganda by Russia or Iran or even Israel — and the rest by the utter disinterest of millions. The reason the United States might be on the brink of electing a 34-times convicted felon as its 47th president is that the felon is getting 53% of the vote from those who admit they don’t follow political news.

You don’t need to be a data scientist to connect the dots between the readership plunge for traditional journalism, Trump’s sustained popularity, and some stunning recent statistics, like the 17% of voters who blame the pro-abortion-rights President Joe Biden for overturning Roe v. Wade, or the 49% who believe U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year high when it’s at a 50-year low. Many voters aren’t afraid of looming autocracy because 76% of Americans know little or nothing about Project 2025, the far-right’s 900-page blueprint for a Trump dictatorship.

If there was an easy solution beyond calling London, we’d be seeing it already. You won’t be shocked to learn that Google’s rollout of AI search results has encountered glitches including some wildly wrong answers called “hallucinations” — and maybe that will give large publishers and Silicon Valley some time to hash things out in court. Especially when one considers that AI search results are based on decades of actual, copyrighted labor by human journalists. There’s a potential role here for government, either in legislation that might address the current power imbalance between Big Tech and traditional publishers, or even in the radical solution of government subsidies for media — which is a bad idea, but not as bad an idea as having no real news media at all.

But how likely is political intervention when one of America’s two major parties already considers journalists “the enemies of the people”? Indeed, the desire for uninformed voters seems to be the common cause that unites the Republican Party and the Silicon Valley billionaires it showers with tax cuts.

I can’t imagine a more dystopian future than the one that Google head of search Elizabeth Reid touted in rolling out AI search results with a slide reading, “Google will do the brainstorming” — in an America where the actual brains of voters become a vestigial organ.

Does democracy really die in darkness? We’re about to find out, very soon.

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