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Depressed? I wanna be sedated--turn on NPR, okay?
Doc, I think you've missed the heart of what Stites is saying. Check the two paragraphs right before the one you quoted:
What really makes me twitch is that the amount and distribution of serious reporting that people can read are both dwindling, and they’re dwindling in a way that all but cuts off citizens who are less than affluent – the hourly wage earners, the marginally self-employed, the Wal-Mart shoppers, the regular folks of America. This is to say most folks. Shortly I’m going to provide you with some fresh and surprising statistics that show how negative this trend is. But let me start by saying that cutting these citizens off from serious reporting is profoundly antidemocratic in and of itself. It distorts the political process by ensuring that a lot of people don’t have the solid information they need to make sound life and citizenship judgments. When you take that one paragraph you quoted out of this context, you're miscontruing his point. People like you and I get the news we need. We aren't the people he's talking about, and we aren't going to be. Even if we suffered financial misfortune that put us on the bottom of the ladder, our pre-developed habits of information seeking would keep us in the loop (possibly to the detriment of getting off the bottom, but that's another story). We expect to be able to find things out. It's a skill we learned over time and (at least in my case) through the luxury of having sufficient financial resources to take the time to learn it. Take an axe to my internet connection, and I'd still get what I needed to know.
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