Our local public radio station is begging for donations. It has lost 40% of its corporate support in the last five years. Companies have been switching their ads to online platforms.
Our local newspaper was bought by Gannett Corporation a few years ago, which folded it into a regional paper. However, the new paper has no editorial section: no opinion pieces, no letters to the editor. It also doesn’t contain much news. Candidates in local elections are not interviewed nor their positions explained. City meetings go unreported. I can’t afford a subscription to the big metropolitan newspaper in our area, which doesn’t often dig down to the local level anyway. There is a neighborhood chat site, but if you didn’t attend the meeting people are upset about, you can’t figure out what actually happened to get them so emotional. The chatty neighbors are not reporters. They don’t tell us what, where, or when; they just vent.
Television broadcast news is so degraded that it doesn’t really matter which broadcast you watch. They all cover the same stories in the same way. There is little hard news, much squishy “human interest” stuff, sports, weather, and almost no international stories except for a minute or two on whichever war is foremost in the public mind.
Meanwhile, our online platforms famously target the news they show us to the prejudices they already know we have. Congress could pass some laws to make those divisive algorithms more balanced and transparent, but our elected officials aren’t anywhere close to doing so.
I love Daily Kos. I learn a lot here. But it is not a substitute for the kind of Just the Facts Ma’am reporting we used to get from our daily paper.
Nobody seems obliged to tell the American public what is going on in our communities, our country, or the world. Public radio and television stations do what they can, but their reach is limited and their resources are rapidly dwindling. Schools are afraid, and sometimes forbidden, to teach about current events, so kids never develop the habit of paying attention to them.
I dream of a public, transparent, online platform that deals in facts, not flash. Couldn’t the big platforms be taxed to support such a thing? Could other public media be reconfigured to report on social media without the algorithms sending their stories to the bottom of the pile?
Yes, there are excellent free news sources, for people who look for them. Al Jazeera and the BBC top my list. Philanthropists are funding new local papers in a few places, but not every town is lucky enough to have a millionaire willing to back reporting that might not always flatter the rich. What Americans need is a public utility. It should be in everybody’s face all the time, just like commercials.
I know hardly anything about what underlies our media landscape. I just know that increasingly, it’s a news desert. I’m sure that among my small but exceptionally intelligent readership, there are some who know a great deal more. Maybe you could dash off an email to educate me about what is legal, what is possible, and what, if any, efforts are underway to educate the rest of us.
I’m not much of a news source, but if I manage to learn anything about all this from you, dear readers, I promise to pass it along.