Death by Dying

Death by Dying

“In cities where the newspaper staffing cuts have been the most severe, we found evidence of lower electoral competition 

for mayoral races in the form of more incumbent-only races, fewer candidates running for office, and larger victory margins. 

We also found suggestive evidence of lower voter turnout in cities with the most drastic newsroom staffing cuts.” 

Newspaper Decline and the Effect on Local Government Coverage. Published by the 

Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, University of Texas (Austin), November 2019

The above quote and chart defined the local newspaper landscape before the pandemic. The Internet, particularly by means of social media and online marketing/search, has long since devastated the business model for local newspapers. Even for those periodicals that have migrated entirely to an online presence, their value proposition to advertisers became diluted by alternative and usually more effective targeted ads. Further, the willingness of consumers to pay subscription rates also seems to have vaporized. Genuine small, focused and honorable (read: journalistic integrity) local newspapers and their online equivalents are simply dying off.

The ability to identify and investigate issues of local importance, which requires staffing, became seriously impaired when the required funding was no longer available. The inability to mount locally relevant, grassroots reportage has contributed materially to the political polarization that defines the United States today. The economic slam from the pandemic, the impact of social distancing and lockdowns on small local advertisers, has only made a bad situation so much worse. Now, prepackaged partisan news is spoon-fed to consumers who have elected to filter their media intake and have outsourced their opinions to “influencers” of like mindset, by forces with severe political agendas that are aimed at nothing more than garnering votes for their cause, regardless of accuracy or veracity.

Writing an OpEd for the December 4th Los Angeles Times, Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the American Journalism Project (a venture philanthropy for nonprofit local news) reflects, beginning with the cost of COVID-19 on American Journalism: “ [Despite] the surging demand for news, the industry has continued to falter. Since the pandemic hit the United States, 36,000 newspaper employees have been laid off, furloughed or subjected to pay cuts. In many cases, advertising, the foundation of the traditional newspaper model, virtually vanished in the economic downturn…

“In the flood of disinformation filling the internet this election season, it was easy to miss [a] rapidly spreading phenomenon: partisan profit-driven websites putting out propaganda masquerading as local news… Across the country, more than 1,000 websites with the look of local journalism are publishing articles, ordered up by political operatives to cast a favorable or unfavorable light on candidates and issues. These websites, like weeds thriving in vacant lots, have grown to fill the void left by the collapse of local newspapers. Readers, eager for information, often can’t tell the difference because these sites are good at masking their purpose.

“In the last 15 years, according to a report by Penelope Abernathy, a scholar at the University of North Carolina who tracks ‘news deserts,’ more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed and 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were left without any at the beginning of 2020. Without local newsrooms, the basic work of reporting — gathering accurate information and demanding transparency and accountability from local governments and powerful business interests — vanishes.

“This loss directly imperils a functioning democracy, which requires an informed citizenry. In communities that have lost a local paper, voters become more polarized, according to a 2018 study by communications scholars. As voters rely more on highly polarized national outlets, they become less likely to cast ballots for candidates beyond any one party.

“The closure of news outlets also makes governments more wasteful; with nobody looking over their shoulder, local officials tend to drive up government wages, taxes and deficits, researchers from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago have found. Conversely, access to reliable local news is associated with higher political participation. Towns with newspapers have greater voter turnout, according to a study led by Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist.

“The disappearance of local journalism has been particularly damaging this year. In the early weeks of the pandemic, news organizations reported spikes in traffic to their websites as people sought out information about COVID-19 and its effects on hospitals, schools and businesses. When protests against racial injustice erupted in June, Americans looked for detailed reporting on policing and criminal justice policies. This year’s elections, likewise, generated record traffic from voters seeking information.” 

Pandering has replaced neutrality. Making profits has usurped fact-checking and accuracy. And well-heeled political candidates and powerful agenda-driven mega-rich individuals and corporations – often completely unleashed and virtually unregulated by the abominable 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which even enabled “contributors” to hide unnamed behind Super-PACs – now can use massive funding from special interests to distort elections and political priorities. Even as social media giants tackle disinformation and truly toxic fake news, from accelerating take-downs to adding their own advisories, reality tells you that too many Americans no longer get their information from reliable sources, particularly local stories that can materially impact their lives and political choices. Partly because those reliable sources are gone or dying. Democracy cannot survive without transparency and accountability. Local news has always been at the heart of both those values.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the macro-issues are whether democracy can survive without truth and whether we can actually solve serious problems if they are misdescribed and marginalized to satisfy some greedy political or economic agenda that considers truth an inconvenience.