How Craigslist gave us Trump

And took away other viewpoints across the country

We might not have The Former Guy at all, not for president in 2016 and not running again now, if not for Craigslist.

Go back in your mind to the time before personal computers, the 70s and early 80s, when the only computers were expensive mainframes, if there were any at all. Where did we get most of our news? The daily newspaper. Yes, there were radio stations and TV news shows, but those mostly gave the headlines and only a little detail. Only newspapers had the room to give us the full story on what was happening.

A century ago, every major and most medium-sized cities had multiple daily papers, each with its own news coverage and viewpoint. And this continued for decades, up to the 1970s and 1980s. A lot of the papers were independent, not owned by chains, but by families; some hit a point where the next generation didn’t want to take over running the family business. The prices of newsprint, ink, and labor went up a bit, even though the majority of papers were nonunion and the editorial staff was paid a pittance. But by the end of the 1980s, nearly every city that had had two papers now had only one — if it still had one at all — and that one was struggling. Few were fully unionized; the only union members at most were the pressmen, the workers who ran the enormous offset printing presses in the basement that started with ink and newsprint on a huge roll and ended with a folded, ready-to-read paper.

Weekly papers back then had the same pressure, but in some ways were less reactive. Most didn’t own their own presses, and contracted with local dailies to print their papers each week. They already had minimal staff, mostly relying on ‘stringers’ who covered meetings and local sports and were paid by the amount of news they produced, often as little as a dollar per column inch.

Meanwhile, the major source of “news” on the radio in those news deserts in the Old Confederacy and elsewhere became Rush Limbaugh, who for years spun tales of prejudice and hatefulness — and inaccuracy, and lack of truth and fact — all labeled as “entertainment” for people who were starving for actual news. It was conservative propaganda, all the way, full of lies about everything in the country that wasn’t right-wing. Limbaugh paved the way for Trump with people who had no other information and no easy way to check facts.

Then came Craigslist. The online classified ad service started in 1995, then by1996 moved quickly from its origin in San Francisco to the whole country. Craigslist was meant as a convenience for people to find what they needed. That was its purpose. Its effect, however, was to remove classified advertising from newspapers. And it stuck an enormous knife in the heart of all remaining newspapers.

You see, classified advertising is the lifeblood of newspapers. That’s what pays the bills, far more than subscriptions do. Display ads may be elegant or flashy, but overall they do not bring in as much money per page as the classifieds. Classifieds support production of the newspaper, and the cost of advertising is determined by the circulation size — the larger the paper, the more can be asked for an ad. This is determined by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, with formulas I won’t get into for lack of space.

Take away the classifieds, and the newspapers crumble. First they reduce the number of pages, then they shed the smaller sections. (From this point onward subscribers start to think twice about what they get for what they’re paying.) Then they cut back on coverage, and reduce the number of reporters. And then someone who owns a chain of papers comes around, with money to pay the paper’s debts, and the owner sells. And the paper goes on in reduced fashion, with perhaps three or five reporters doing the work of ten.

The bigger Craigslist got, the more papers were affected. As this went on, the weekly papers were hit also, because Craigslist was extending its reach into less populated areas adjacent to cities. The more this happened, the more weeklies closed. Every paper that closed eliminated a variety of opinions on local, state and national news.

Along with this came the issue of modernization, which has been a problem for newspapers for a century. This is especially true when the papers are used by their owners as cash cows to be milked in support of something else instead of using the profits to support the papers themselves. Many owners have been slow to move to computers because of the cost of equipment and training, let alone providing news and classifieds online; I suspect this was influenced also by the unwillingness to do anything that might change staffing (in union papers) or require actual money (in poorer nonunion ones that were already understaffed.) Still, without Craigslist diverting the papers’ primary source of funding, many more of the older papers would still exist, which would mean many more experienced reporters covering news and politics and providing a variety of opinions to readers.

Understand, I’m not saying Craigslist’s owners did this on purpose to wipe out papers, but the timing was disastrous for them.

Then more money men came calling at the struggling papers. These were bloodsuckers, carpetbaggers, the ones who wanted to buy buy buy, and then shut down the papers and sell off the holdings for what they could get. And right about at that time came a tv show, The Apprentice, whose featured star was a failed businessman with multiple bankruptcies who nevertheless managed to look as if he knew what he was doing — Donald Trump.

No longer were there enough journalistic voices to question his views and factcheck his speeches in the places where they were most needed. Meanwhile, Limbaugh had poisoned people’s minds about genuine journalism, so that they thought the big papers that worked to present the news in as neutral a style as possible were evil and prejudiced against them. These people refused to read anything from outside the news desert where they lived, or listen to any opposing viewpoints.

So, here we are today. We still have a few dailies in major and medium cities — but not enough, not everywhere. Most weeklies that survived have shrunk into weekly shoppers, full of ads and maybe local sports scores but no real coverage of events; there isn’t enough income to support a couple of reporters even though there would be plenty for them to write about.

And still there are not enough independent newspapers in the Old Confederacy and elsewhere to provide commentary and fact-checking on what Trump and his cohort say. Many of the papers that remain are owned by organizations run by Republicans or their sympathizers, and so are even more radio and TV stations. Today there are computers — or cell phones — in nearly every home, but how many people are hearing or seeing critical depth reporting about the Republican viewpoint, or about Project 2025, that path toward authoritarianism and fascism planned by Trumpists? And, despite the handy nature of the average cell phone, it can be tedious trying to read a long news article on that tiny screen.

People hear a lot of things — but hearing is not like seeing. Someone who sees a headline and reads a couple of paragraphs is further ahead than someone who partly hears a radio or tv news report, because newspaper articles are written in inverted pyramid style — most important information at the top. There’s no way to know, when listening to the radio, whether what’s being said is the most important thing or supporting something else that has already been mentioned and isn’t being repeated.

So, because of Craigslist coming when it did, the people without easy access to newspapers and daily news that was independent of political stance fell into line behind Trump because that was the majority of news, commentary and influence that they were exposed to.

NO Thanks, Craigslist.