Newspapers could simply fade in America, unable to make the post-print transition, but what if they’re able to turn a profit from a much smaller readership and sustain themselves, even thrive, in that fashion?

If companies can monetize this tinier base without touching the masses, that could lead to the present polarization becoming permanently entrenched, a battle between those largely informed and those not nearly. You don’t have to ban books if most people aren’t reading, and you needn’t censor the news if enough eyes are closed.

On his blog, journalist Clive Davis posted a pertinent quote from Alistair Cooke, who wondered in 1952 how fascism would be received when newsprint was no longer prominent, when a Hitler wouldn’t even have to bother to wrest control of the presses. An excerpt:

We don’t know yet what the televising of the conventions will do to American politics, to elections, to the convention system itself. Some of us fear what one good demagogue with a fine voice and a rousing profile might do to the tyranny of popular government…. The only time that I ever saw Adolf Hitler was at a big rally outside the Brauhaus in Munich in 1931. I was a student who had only just heard of him. I got jammed in there and I watched him and soon felt my heart begin to pound. He was – all morals, politics aside – a superb performer. When he got to his peroration, he ended on a practically meaningless sentence. He shouted, “It is five minutes to twelve.” Nobody knew in his head what Hitler meant. But they felt they had been slapped on the back and a sword put in their hands. Hitler paid a direct physical compliment to the nervous system. I had to fight my frightened way out over fainting women and cheering, sobbing men.

I was glad the next morning to sit down and see it in the newspaper and know that most Germans could sit back and read, and judge the speech unmoved, unseduced by the physical experience of the thing itself. The next Hitler will not suffer from this restraint.•