What we don’t know can still hurt us

How will we know? If things take a serious turn for the worse, how will we find out in time to do anything about it?

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and subsequent suspension of Jimmy Kimmel have stirred a lot of commentary about freedom of speech, and that’s a serious subject that should be explored. There was another development last week that raises ominous questions about what, going forward, we’ll have to speak about.

The Department of Agriculture announced it was terminating its annual Household Food Security Report, which has for 30 years provided statistics on how many Americans don’t have enough food at least part of the time.

“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” a USDA press release said.

The termination means that as $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are enacted over the next 10 years as part of the Big, Beautiful Bill Act, the government won’t be reporting on hunger as it has in the past. The press release says the USDA will “where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it,” but says nothing about making this information available to the public. If more people go hungry in the future, the USDA appears not to take any responsibility for letting the country know about it.

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the release of its annual consumer spending report, due Tuesday, has been postponed “to a later date.” The report provides data used to calculate the inflation rate. The Trump administration is said to be preparing a report critical of the way the BLS calculates statistics. This follows the firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August, following a disappointing jobs report.

It’s much the same story, from hurricanes to measles. This broad-based attack on numbers and hard facts within government comes at a time when control of the media through which most people get their information is falling into fewer and fewer hands.

That’s the story that lurks behind Kimmel’s suspension. Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, is seeking approval to buy Tegna, which owns 13 stations. The Walt Disney Co. has a huge deal pending with the National Football League. Small wonder, then, that Kimmel didn’t last long when Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr threatened to crack down.

Most Americans don’t know much about Oracle founder Larry Ellison and his son David, but they could pull off a deal that would make the Murdochs look like pikers. It would put CBS, CNN, Paramount, HBO, Discovery and TikTok in their hands.

All this consolidation is likely to mean less diversity among the various media brands and fewer opportunities for the truly curious to get a different take on the information they receive. Of course the reason this consolidation is going on is that the old brands are steadily losing ground to an explosion of online information sources. But information is becoming more of a niche commodity, and along with that, it’s becoming less reliable.

With the economy now staked on AI and devices arranged around us to deliver information, it may be hard to conceive of a future in which we have significantly less access to things we really know, but the future is close.

Without reliable statistics and reliable sources reporting them, we’ll know about climate change the next time a hurricane shows up hundreds of miles from where we thought hurricanes were supposed to be. We’ll know about the next deadly disease after enough people have died from it to attract attention. And we may not know hunger is on the rise until our own bellies are empty.