It has nothing to do with his tweets.
President Donald Trump’s governance has had a Janus-like quality. On the one hand—sorry, face—he tweets something fierce, lambasting Jeff Bezos, Kim Jong-un, big drug companies, and sundry other enemies. But then he invariably fails to back up his tweets with action. Under his presidency, drug prices are up, Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, and Kim Jong-un is probably due for a state dinner any day now.
The president’s routine broadsides against the “fake news media” have long seemed to be part of that pattern. Trump tweets that the press is “fake,” and “ the enemy of the people ” who “ make up stories. ” But, despite the hysteria this invariably engenders, he’s done nothing to put his distaste for the media into action. We don’t live in Hungary or Russia just yet.
And yet, newspapers are in deep trouble right now, and for once, the press’s woes are partially the result of the president’s actions.
First, the sorry state of affairs: On Monday, New York’s Daily News, the ninth-biggest paper in the country by circulation, lost half its editorial staff in grievous layoffs. The News is hardly alone: Pew reports this week that more than a third of American newspapers have seen mass layoffs in the last year. More and more papers are cutting delivery days or abandoning print altogether.
Obviously, newspapers have been in decline since around the time of Trump’s (first) bankruptcy. The advent of the Internet, the decline in classified ads, ever shorter attention spans—all have been murder on your once hugely profitable local daily.
Add to that a typically Trumpian measure: tariffs.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration unveiled tariffs on imports of uncoated ground wood paper from Canada of up to 32 percent to combat what the Commerce Department charges are unfair subsidies to Canadian paper manufacturers. Uncoated ground wood paper is the main product used for manufacturing books, advertising circulars, magazines, and yes, newspapers. Prices have skyrocketed accordingly: According to one regional newspaper, the Providence Journal, newsprint costs are up 25 percent in less than one year. Media analyst Ken Doctor suggests newsprint costs may spike 35 percent in total. The American president has not gone the route of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and literally begun taxing speech he doesn’t like, but these tariffs do amount to a massive tax on the press. Given that newspapers are already suffering from declining revenues, this massive increase in costs could not come at a more fraught time. Newspapers are media, yes, but they are also essentially a manufactured product.
Perversely, it’s not the openly anti-Trump national media that will suffer the most from the tariffs. The New York Times and Washington Post, both engaged in essentially open warfare with the president, have done an admirable job building up large numbers of paying digital subscribers; print is less important to them. Not so for small regional dailies—they still rely on print for the bulk of their circulation revenue. So too do tabloids like the Daily News, which appeal to the working class. And come to think of it, so do a couple of other publications, the New York Post and the National Enquirer, who have been kinder to the president. When his tariffs bite, will he think of them?
