It’s OK to Be Paying a Little Less Attention to Politics Now

The ratings are down for political programming. Good.

It has been a difficult few years for the media industry, with newspapers being raided by vulture capitalists, once-great websites being gutted by private equity firms and the President of the United States referring to journalists as “enemies of the people,” rhetoric that inevitably led to disturbed people trying to kill them. The news media is the least trusted institution in the United States (other than Congress, of course), which is a bad sign when your entire reason for being is to inform, and to be trusted by, the public. It’s a rough time all around.

But one thing that has been going well for the media the last few years? Ratings. Say what you will about the former president — and there is a lot you can say, he’s a pretty terrible person — but he was correct when he boasted that his tenure in the White House was terrific for news organizations. During the Trump era, ratings were up, pageviews were up, subscriptions were up. Now, a lot of those things went up because everything was so awful: It certainly was strange when Trump boasted that his coronavirus briefings did such great ratings, considering most people were tuning in to find out if the government was doing anything to stop hundreds of thousands of people from…