Bad News About the News

Andy Snyder|July 22, 2021

We’ve got bad news.

No, we don’t mean we’ve got something negative to tell you.

Well, not really.

What we mean to say is that our news – as in the way the world’s happenings are reported – is in bad shape.

This situation has huge financial, economic and social implications.

Two years ago, we wrote a piece for our paying Manward Letter subscribers. We detailed the soaring price of shares of The New York Times Company (NYT) thanks to the “Trump bump.”

Prior to the November 2016 election, the stock had been in a terrible slump for several years. When Trump celebrated his win, the stock traded for just $13.

Just before he left office, the stock hit a high of $58.73.

From Trump’s election to Biden’s inauguration, the stock rose 307%, flat-out crushing the S&P’s record-breaking run.

But the last six months haven’t treated shareholders so well.

The bump has flattened.

Missing Trump

From Biden’s Inauguration Day to now, the stock has fallen 12% while the S&P has climbed 12%.

That’s not a surprise.

It’s just like we told our readers in 2019. After getting a nearly instantaneous surge of 400,000 more readers when Trump got the nod, the rag of record merely had to give folks what they wanted.

According to the company’s CEO, subscriber growth surged based on “intense interest and anxiety about the election.”

The news certainly gave readers plenty to chew on.

But Trump is gone… and shareholders are giving back their gains.

Like we said, the news is bad. The news is in trouble.

But it gets worse…

If Trump’s election was the best thing that ever happened to the mainstream press, the pandemic was a very close second.

The News Catches the Flu

The Atlantic is a news source that doesn’t hide its bias. It focuses its reporting on “a handful of ideas we thought represented authentic guiding commitments for us and to our audience.”

It took on the pandemic like few other sources.

It paid off.

“We did four years of business last year,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief.

Even so, the company lost $20 million last year and will likely lose half that figure again this year.

It’s not good news.

But the scary thing is what Goldberg said next.

“One of the core challenges is, how do we keep all those new subscribers?”

We got our hands on The Atlantic‘s key metrics. It’s not keeping those subscribers.

It’s losing 20% of its current subscribers each month, while selling just 10,000 new subscriptions.

Doing the math, the subscriber roll is falling quickly.

The Trump bump in the news industry is over.

How does The New York Times keep selling to an audience that wants political fire and brimstone? How does The Atlantic keep selling to folks who subscribed because of its in-depth pandemic coverage?

We don’t need to tell you the answer.

Just turn on the news these days. It’s bad.

Of course, not everything out there is fake. But if you’ve ever been featured in a news story and seen firsthand just how much of it was wrong, you’ll understand why the “fake news” crowd has so much ammo in its pocket.

But our aim this morning goes beyond all that. We want you to use our thoughts and the numbers we’ve shared to make your own decisions.

Don’t rely on the nightly news for the truth. It’s in trouble and is fighting to survive.

It’s vital to find multiple news sources… the more underground they are, the better.

The big boys have big shareholders to answer to. And right now, the pressure is on.

They either need to cook up a story… or start filling out pink slips.

It’s bad news.

P.S. For proof of why this is so important for your money and the markets… just look at the crypto space. The mainstream media has almost totally failed to report on what could be the BIGGEST moneymaking story of the year – a major crypto announcement that could come just weeks from now. Forget the mainstream folks… We’ve got all the details here.