"One-newspaper towns are not good because all the surviving newspaper does is print money. They make 25 percent on their money every year, and if they go down to 22 percent, they start laying people off"
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Monopoly is a quiet kind of censorship: it doesn’t need to silence anyone when it can simply stop investing in the work. Pat Oliphant’s line lands with the bluntness of a newsroom budget meeting, but it’s really a moral diagnosis disguised as an earnings report. “One-newspaper towns” sounds quaint, even nostalgic, until he flips the frame: the surviving paper isn’t surviving for civic reasons; it’s surviving because it’s a cash machine.
Oliphant’s intent is to puncture the myth that a local paper’s dominance equals stability. He points to the perverse incentive structure of monopoly media: when you don’t have competition, your product can deteriorate while your profits stay fat. The subtext is that the newspaper ceases to behave like a public institution and starts behaving like a rent-seeking utility. Journalism becomes the minimum viable output required to keep the ad dollars flowing.
The most cutting move is the specificity of “25 percent” dropping to “22 percent.” That tiny slide, still wildly profitable by most industries’ standards, triggers layoffs. Oliphant isn’t just condemning greed; he’s spotlighting how managerial logic treats reporting as a cost center to be trimmed, not a mission to be protected. The public loses watchdog coverage not because the town stopped needing it, but because Wall Street-grade expectations got imported into a local civic organ.
Context matters: Oliphant came up in an era when consolidation and chain ownership steadily hollowed out American newspapers. As a cartoonist, he’s trained to make systems visible in a few strokes; here, the punchline is that the town thinks it owns a paper, while the paper’s margins own the town.
Oliphant’s intent is to puncture the myth that a local paper’s dominance equals stability. He points to the perverse incentive structure of monopoly media: when you don’t have competition, your product can deteriorate while your profits stay fat. The subtext is that the newspaper ceases to behave like a public institution and starts behaving like a rent-seeking utility. Journalism becomes the minimum viable output required to keep the ad dollars flowing.
The most cutting move is the specificity of “25 percent” dropping to “22 percent.” That tiny slide, still wildly profitable by most industries’ standards, triggers layoffs. Oliphant isn’t just condemning greed; he’s spotlighting how managerial logic treats reporting as a cost center to be trimmed, not a mission to be protected. The public loses watchdog coverage not because the town stopped needing it, but because Wall Street-grade expectations got imported into a local civic organ.
Context matters: Oliphant came up in an era when consolidation and chain ownership steadily hollowed out American newspapers. As a cartoonist, he’s trained to make systems visible in a few strokes; here, the punchline is that the town thinks it owns a paper, while the paper’s margins own the town.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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