In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.
That sounds like nonsense. If the separate papers appealed to separate demographics, a separate income for one wouldn't affect the sales of the other. If people started switching newspapers they would still be reading so you wouldn't be able to pin to this a disappearance of literacy. The only way this could happen is if newsstands actually dropped certain papers in favor of others, but considering the demographic split, it seems unlikely that this would be possible in all areas.
Even if you grant that this actually happened, it's hard to say that this caused illiteracy rather than the reverse, Considering the shear volume of tabloids, magazines, and newspapers that cater to the relatively illiterate.
Either way, it's a massive generalization and I don't think it holds water.
That sounds like nonsense. If the separate papers appealed to separate demographics, a separate income for one wouldn't affect the sales of the other. If people started switching newspapers they would still be reading so you wouldn't be able to pin to this a disappearance of literacy. The only way this could happen is if newsstands actually dropped certain papers in favor of others, but considering the demographic split, it seems unlikely that this would be possible in all areas.
Even if you grant that this actually happened, it's hard to say that this caused illiteracy rather than the reverse, Considering the shear volume of tabloids, magazines, and newspapers that cater to the relatively illiterate.
Either way, it's a massive generalization and I don't think it holds water.