I (didn’t) read the news today, oh boy!

David Bowie was an especially literate pop star. He was a voracious reader and advocate of reading, and loaded his lyrics with sometimes obscure literary references. He even released a (somewhat cryptic) list of 100 influential books. I am not alone in appreciating that Bowie “gave us something to do” by nudging us to read.

All that was on my mind recently, when I was listening to a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution from a Wall Street Journal columnist who was arguing that lack of trust in media has been aggravated due to partisan journalists. I think he got it wrong. The columnist, Jason Riley, made a distinction between columnists like himself and straight reporters, and argued that the reporters have a partisan bias which has contributed to distrust in the media. He strongly implied that this distrust centered around newspapers. But the biggest problem with that argument is that people aren’t reading newspapers anymore. Actually, people just aren’t reading. David Bowie would not be pleased.

OK, OK, this is going to be another post that doesn’t really focus on Bowie. I wanted an excuse to both pull apart the argument I heard from Riley and contemplate an Atlantic article that came our around the same time titled, “The End of Reading is here,” by Rose Horowitch (who I invited onto my show, but she’s apparently too busy at the moment).

Horowitch reported, “fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story… the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.” Its more of the same when it comes to news consumption: “In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

Among those lonely few who still read newspapers, Donald Trump, who Horowtch characterized as “our first postliterate president,” holds little appeal— “Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers.” That is an amazing stat. Yet, according to Riley, anti-Trump bias among newspaper reporters is why people don’t trust media these days.

Do you notice a problem with this line of thinking? How can anyone distrust a medium that they aren’t reading? Unless Riley meant that all those newspaper readers who favored Biden so heavily don’t trust media because reporters also favored Biden. Which makes no sense and isn’t what he argued.

What he did argue is “roughly half the country supported Trump’s presidential bids, but that was true for less than 5% of the political press. This was already a problem a quarter century ago, when most of the public trusted the media. Now, most people don’t trust the media, and it poses a much, much bigger problem.”

The first problem with this assertion is that, even given the accuracy of the statistic he cited, he wasn’t citing a stat about newspaper stories. The implication is that half of newspaper readers support Trump, yet 95% of straight newspaper coverage of Trump betrayed a partisan bias against him. That’s the implication, right? But Riley didn’t actually say any of that. (And, I’d add, regarding 2016 in particular—- what about her emails!)

I should note that Riley would pivot between talking about an ill-defined “political press” and, specifically newspaper journalists. He might not have always meant the same thing, but time and again he kept coming back to newspaper reporters who were not columnists. But collectively, this is a subset of “political press” that fewer and fewer people are going to for news at all.

According to a June 2026 Gallup survey, Americans now get most of their news from social media (54%) and news websites or apps (44%), while only 8% cite print newspapers or magazines. A small but growing source of news, that wasn’t around in 2016 is AI (though as of now just 2% cite AI chatbots or assistants as one of their top three news sources). According to a Pew study from earlier this year, when breaking news occurs, Americans are most likely to turn first to their preferred news organization (36%), followed by search engines (28%) and social media (19%), while 5% first seek information from friends and family. Now, “preferred news organization” is a broad term, but that would include newspapers, so whatever percentage turn to newspapers for breaking news coverage, that’s less than 36%. There are many more stats like this. The point is that newspapers make up a small and shrinking percentage of what constitutes “media.”

Horowitch was not simply lamenting the passing of a medium. She went on to report on how reading (and writing) cultivate critical thinking. “What’s at risk,” she wrote, “is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself.” Trump, she writes, “has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.” It is worth reproducing an extended quote that reflects on how Trump communicates:

His “communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—‘Low-Energy Jeb,’ ‘Little Marco,’ ‘Sleepy Joe’—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase ‘Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!’”

“It is difficult to imagine,” wrote Horowitch, [Trump] “being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text.”

Riley, I guess was implicitly arguing that a majority of voters (not overall, I guess but in enough states for Trump to have won the Electoral College in 2016) saw through the bias of text composed by Hillary Clinton partisans, elected Trump anyway and now resent the media because of it.

Riley and Horowitch cannot be living in the same reality. I wasn’t sure if Riley’s prescription for renewing trust in news media was to make it more balanced or more neutral (not at all the same thing). Had Horowitch been part of the discussion, though, she might have said that the question of balance was not between Democrats and Republicans, but between the literate and the post-literate. Regardless of partisanship, Trump would never win amongst the literate, and he’d command a huge advantage among the post-literate until and unless someone else came along who mastered the communication techniques of a post-literate age. In the meantime, those who think “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!” is a good way for a president to communicate will favor Trump, and those who don’t, won’t.

Yet I can imagine an area of overlap. One of the flaws of Riley’s reasoning is that he conflated mistrust of media with mistrust of straight newspaper reporters (again, he made a distinction between such reporters an opinion columnists). But perhaps that mistrust is of a broader definition of media. Perhaps, at least some of those who distrust media are distrusting, I don’t know, TikTok. And if they distrust newspapers that they don’t read, maybe that has less to do with reporting by newspaper reporters and more to do with what they heard about newspaper reporters on TikTok. Perhaps, then, Riley and Horowitch are really lamenting the same thing: the decline in reading.

—-