The Decline of Reading

 According to his former economic adviser, Gary Cohen, "Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing." Instead he gets most of his news from screens: Fox News and Truth Social are favourites. This preference explains a lot about the chaos of our present politics.

The president is hardly alone in his allergy to the written word. Reading is in decline everywhere. Most widely cited are a series of reports suggesting that students from universities are increasingly unable to read the books their lecturers assign to them. According to one professor, his students were "intimidated by anything over ten pages." And this is more than merely the sort of thing professors always said about their students...

The Inattentive Reader
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC ND]

A study of the leisure habits of nearly a quarter of a million Americans found that the number who spent time reading on a typical day (including newspapers, magazines and audiobooks) fell by 40 per cent between 2003 and 2023. In Britain, a 2024 survey by the charity the Reading Agency found that more than a third of adults describe themselves as "lapsed readers - that is they used to read regularly but no longer do. And the declines in reading are starkest among the young. According to data from the National Literacy Trust, children's reading rates are now the lowest on record...

It is not hard to guess what is going on. The big culprit is the smartphone, which became widespread in the early 2010s. Smartphones are designed to be addictive, using an array of content-recommendation algorithms, notifications and endlessly scrolling feeds of content to keep your attention fixed almost permanently on the screen. Phones shatter the concentration required for deep reading...

The decline of reading is about more than the fading of a pleasant hobby. It is one of the most important trends of our time. We are moving from a literate culture based on the written word to a visual one, dominated by moving images...

Political discourse that was once conducted in print - with its remarkable capacity for sustaining logical thought and extended argument - now takes place in the moronic inferno of social media...

It might be going too far to say (as ambitious historians once liked to) that Rousseau and Paine's books triggered respectively the French and American revolutions. But both works were enormously politically influential. Crucially, both Rousseau and Paine were men whose voices and ideas would have counted for nothing in the age  before widespread literacy...

Books and newspapers not only spread information they change the way we think... When you make a written argument you must set out your ideas logically, supply evidence and explain your conclusions. And readers have your arguments fixed in front of them, allowing them to submit them to closer critical analysis... Literacy fosters more critical and abstract thinking, helping us to generalise about the world and to analyse it logically...

But as reading declines and more people turn to videos for political information, the literate culture that sustained sophisticated argument and rational debate is crumbling... If you want to succeed in 21st-century politics you must become a master of social media and especially of TikTok...

In the new politics being forged  by the smartphone, spectacle comes before thought. Donald Trump is a master of screens as well as an addict of them. Officials are appointed not for their ideas or policy experience but according to whether they look the part...

Most dangerous for democracy is the fact that screens love personalities. If you want to win people over in print you will need to make an argument and supply evidence. If you want to persuade on screen charisma is more important. The greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century comes not from an ideology such as communism or fascism but from a political tendency sometimes known as "personalism"...

Screens allow strongmen to get close to their followers, to appear in their lives as an everyday presence, even a friend. The aim is not to persuade through rational argument or effective policy but to draw viewers into a cult of personality. This is a dangerous direction for democracy.

(James Marriott, The Times, 2026)

That reading is in decline and social media is in the ascendancy makes critical thinking more important than ever. When these political personalities talk are they supplying any evidence for their pronouncements. Is that evidence reliable? What assumptions are being made? Analyse what they say logically. How do we know that what they say is true? Use the Socratic method, Ask the questions and question the answers.