A Pew Research Center analysis found that in 2020, about a quarter of Republicans and Democrats consistently turned only to news outlets whose audiences aligned with them politically.
Melinda Henneberger recalls recently visiting old friends at The Dallas Morning News, where she had worked from 1984 to 1989, and being startled to see a large section of the newsroom unoccupied. “It was just so quiet,” she says. Henneberger, of course, knew why: Newspaper readership, and newspaper revenue, had been declining everywhere. The Morning News, which had already seen its rival the Dallas Times-Herald cease publication as readers spurned afternoon papers a generation ago, was responding like the others, with layoffs and downsizing.
