A new Politico report tries to tease out the relationship between America's rapidly dwindling local news sources and the rise of the famously fact-averse Donald Trump. In it, they argue that Trump most outperformed prior Republican nominee Mitt Romney in "news deserts"—counties with few local news outlets and subscribers—while underperforming Romney in counties with more robust subscription numbers.
In other words, they argue that there's a clear correlation of Trump-voting counties and the news consumption itself.
The results show a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hillary Clinton and when compared to Romney in 2012. Those links were statistically significant even when accounting for other factors that likely influenced voter choices, such as college education and employment, suggesting that the decline of local media sources by itself may have played a role in the election results.
This is a dodgy thing to try to pin down, from an interpretation standpoint. We know from the data that there is a clear link between low news consumption and voting for Trump—but do we know that the first caused the second, in that persons who may have been inclined to vote for Trump but who had more access to newsprint may have been dissuaded by those stories, or are they both symptoms of something else?
Could "news desert" counties be places where the residents are already predisposed to ignoring news media—thus explaining why local news sources could not survive there? That seems unlikely. The primary characteristic of "news deserts" is that they are rural; they are locations where the population isn't high enough to sustain multiple, or any, news outlets strictly as financial concern. Such places are more reliant on far-reaching syndicated programs to begin with, most notably talk radio. And rural populations tend to have plenty of other characteristics and priorities that are markedly different from urban and suburban centers, whether the news sources were there or not.
Rural counties are conservative to begin with; less diverse, less tolerant, more religious, and with hardscrabble (if mistaken, from a dollars-and-cents point of view) visions of being less reliant on government; it is to be expected that someone like Trump, who made the denomination of immigrants and a general contempt for government figures into the key planks of his narrow platform, would find more appeal in those places than the more milquetoast Romney.
At the Washington Post, Philip Bump argues that the Politico analysis is still primarily measuring that rural-urban divide; it's just coming at it from another direction. We still don't know that low news consumption is the causal factor.
The challenge with a lot of data analysis is that it’s hard to pick out causality. We could flip our argument on its head: How do we know that the reason more-rural places voted for Trump wasn’t because they had fewer news subscribers? Or, as a critic of the Politico argument told its authors, perhaps it was lower rates of education in those counties that led to more Trump support.
That critic was Emory University professor Gregory Martin, who noted to Politico that:
“Newspaper circulation itself is a measure of education — above and beyond college attendance of other metrics,” said Martin, suggesting that political literacy isn’t simply a matter of degrees attained, but a level of attentiveness to detail that’s harder to measure.
That may be the one point we Trump skeptics can flatter ourselves on, in this: It seems clear that those who go out of their way to consume political news are, by definition, more attentive to the details of candidate policies and more critical of their misstatements than those whose primary political knowledge comes from drive-time radio or family word of mouth; the more news you consume, the more keenly aware you are of just how many false and ridiculous things come out of Donald Trump's mouth. (It's of little wonder that the conservative pundit class, denizens of media themselves, were the conservatives who bailed on Trump earliest and most vociferously.)
But how any of that translates to fixing the core underlying problem of civic literacy, in this country, is unclear. Smalltown newspapers aren't coming back. It's possible online versions will eventually find their way, but there's no assurance they will adhere to the same journalistic standards as their better financed, larger predecessors. And as of right now, there is no apparent ache in the public to consume more or better information; we are a prosperous enough nation that most Americans do not feel an urgent need to guide or interact with their government. That is a separate problem.