‘News Deserts’ Are Rapidly Expanding Throughout Our Nation
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
‘News Deserts’ Are Rapidly Expanding Throughout Our Nation
More specifically, 208 counties now don’t have a newspaper. An additional 1,630 counties only have one paper, which in most cases is a weekly with insufficient staff to cover multiple communities in a way that supplies even a bare minimum of the news people need to make informed decisions. In the past three years alone, the nation has lost 360 newspapers. This reflects the acceleration of a long-term trend. “Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025,” the study authors wrote.
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Generally speaking, the communities losing newspapers tend to be lower income and with less access to ‘reliable high-speed digital service,' making local residents reliant on the limited morsels of local news that are available on social media apps accessed through their mobile phones, according to the study. This is creating an information divide. A series of studies document the negative impacts on local governance and for our democracy overall in the decline of robust local news coverage. Among the negative impacts are reductions in civic engagement, increases in corruption, and more polarization.
People trust local news more than national news in part because it tends to be reported without the same kind of partisan or ideological filter that characterizes most of the national news we receive. Unlike national cable news, for example, it is usually designed to be appealing to the entire community, not a slice of the electorate. So, with a dangerous level of political polarization in the nation, reversing the decline of local news is imperative.
It is also mainly on the local level where people learn the skills and habits essential for effective self-governance: how to reach principled compromises with people with whom they may disagree; how to distinguish between facts and evidence-based arguments and falsehoods and disinformation; and how to accept that sometimes your side wins and sometimes your side loses, but more important than the outcome of any individual election is protecting the democratic process and that means accepting the results no matter how much we don’t like them. It is in this spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”
Robust local news coverage is the lifeblood of local democratic action and governance—the foundation upon which our democracy is built It will require new innovative thinking as well as a comprehensive approach that includes for-profit and non-profit options to generate the turn-around required. As the study’s authors aptly proclaim, “Getting news to those communities that have lost the news involves rethinking both current journalistic practices—as well as for-profit, nonprofit and public funding policies at the national, state and local levels.”
This admittedly daunting task is urgent and vital. The words that Thomas Jefferson wrote about the importance of newspapers in 1787 still ring true today. "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”