Its consequences will be borne by foreigners with ragged clothes or by a few professional soldiers. In the US and Britain the only publications which think it is worth spending the large sums of money needed to stay in the business of international news are those which have a business readership. British politicians rage against the abolition of daily parliamentary reports. But most people have long since stopped paying attention to what is said in parliament, except on special occasions. To say that people are no longer interested in high politics does not mean that they have lost all interest in public affairs.
People worry, more than ever, about disease, global warming and so on.
For 75 years, people in the western world were afraid of war. Now they are afraid of other things. They are afraid of cancer, strokes, Aids, incompetent surgeons, GM food. They fret about being ugly and whether their sex life is as good as it could be. The media as a business can benefit from this shift in emphasis, partly because lifestyle journalism and even science journalism are relatively cheap compared to maintaining foreign news bureaux.