Local Citizenship

Losing the News

In a recent interview, former President Barack Obama described the experience of introducing himself to America in his 2008 campaign. Going into small towns, Obama reflects, he would meet the editor of the local newspaper, “a conservative guy” who’s “been a Republican for years.” This local newsman isn’t sympathetic to Obama’s politics, but “he’ll take a meeting with me” and acknowledge his decency, if not endorse his platform. Likewise, Obama said, “the local TV station will cover me straight.”

2008 doesn’t seem that long ago, but in media terms, it’s an entirely different world. In these same small towns and communities today, Obama says, “the newspapers are gone.” While social media pulled advertising dollars and news consumers away from local papers, 24-hour cable news networks have spent years building up partisan profiles by replacing the work of news-gathering with punditry and analysis.

Similarly, while many newspapers have seen their readership crash and many have closed their doors, a few major national newspapers built stronger operations with a broad base of digital subscribers. Nationwide, circulation, staff and advertising revenue have plunged over the last decade. According to one study, 1,800 newspapers, or one out of every five, closed between 2004 and 2019, leaving communities without basic information about local government decisions, community events and the low-grade corruption that doesn’t make the national news. Even big-city dailies that have held on have seen their staff and pages shrink.

One result of replacing local news with the national news of cable networks and viral social media content is increased political polarization. If our media consumption is heavily nationalized, it’s easier for us to view every story, every election and every public issue in terms of national parties and priorities. As the gap widens, it becomes easier and easier to focus on the more thrilling (and infuriating) business of national politics. At the same time, it becomes harder for a candidate introducing himself or herself to a new constituency to get the kind of fair hearing Obama remembers getting from those conservative small-town papers. It also becomes harder to exercise our citizenship closer to home. “[O]ur community does not know itself and has no idea of important local issues,” a citizen in a small city that lost its paper reports. Read More 

Lutheran pastor Benjamin J. Dueholm makes some good points in his article. When I go online, I must scroll down almost to the bottom of the page to read the local news. While I keep an eye on national developments, particularly those that may one way or another affect churches and other religious organizations, I am largely interested in what is happening closer to home, in the local community, the region, and in my case, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and our close neighbors--Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois. What happens in Kentucky's neighboring states can and does affect Kentucky. The Kentucky-Tennessee border is less than a 20 minute drive from where I live. When I go online, I also look for articles on esoteric subjects such as how Stone Age cave dwellers protected their grass bedding from bugs, beer brewing in ancient Mesopotamia, the kinds of foods ancient peoples ate, archeological discoveries, flying lemurs, and the like. One of my top priorities is the latest research into the COVID-19 coronavirus, its transmission, prevention, treatment, vaccine development, and the progress of the vaccine rollout in the United States.