[upbeat music]
Broadcast.
Thank you very much, and have a good evening.
[Narrator] Over the past few decades,
local journalism has been decimated
across the United States.
Newsrooms have shrunk,
TV stations have stopped sending reporters to small towns,
and local papers have dwindled
or shut down entirely due to corporate buyouts.
Local news is a keystone of democracy.
So what happens to democracy
without local news?
[solemn music]
There were reporters covering communities
all over the state, reporters covering state agencies,
reporters covering issues.
We really covered pretty much everything.
This is David Owens,
a former reporter who covered the state of Connecticut
for 32 years—
first, at a small local paper
and then at The Hartford Courant,
the state's largest daily newspaper
and the oldest continuously published paper
in the United States.
When I went to The Hartford Courant,
I went into a newsroom of 400 people.
I saw that number decline dramatically
to probably 40 when I left.
The steep decline Owens saw
is mirrored in newsrooms across the country.
25% of all U.S. newspapers have shut down since 2005.
Nearly 50% of counties only have one paper,
typically a weekly.
And as of 2022, 211 counties—
where more than 70 million Americans live—
don't have a local newspaper at all.
There's also the way the news business has changed.
We've gone from a deadline of 5:00 in the afternoon
to file your story for the next morning's newspaper,
to having to feed the beast all day,
and that prevents you from, perhaps, doing the amount
of detailed reporting that you want to do.
There is less coverage of environmental issues.
There's less coverage of development projects,
school board meetings, government corruption,
police misconduct, and so much more.
This is Kate Ruane.
She's the director of the U.S. Free Expression Programs
at PEN America, a nonprofit
that champions free expression through literature.
The organization released an expansive report in 2019
that explored the decline of local journalism
throughout the U.S.
Without local news reporters creating stories
that the people within the community all trust
and agree upon as being the basis
from which political discussion can launch,
then that is where we start to see diverging realities.
That is where we start to see things
like disinformation campaigns coming in
to divide us even further.
We see things like election denialism,
we see things like a lack of understanding
of environmental impacts.
This is in part
because of the national sources people turn to
in the absence of local news.
These national outlets tend to attract audiences
along party lines.
Conservatives mainly watch Fox News,
and liberals tend to rely on CNN, NPR, MSNBC,
and The New York Times.
When people consume their news in these echo chambers,
increased political polarization shows up at the ballot box.
Multiple studies have found that in jurisdictions
that have experienced a decline in local journalism,
there's less split-ticket voting.
In other words, more people are voting
for all Democrats or all Republicans
than they were when they had local news
to inform their decisions.
Beyond this political division,
there are simply fewer people voting in the first place.
There's also less scrutiny
of those running in local and state races.
There's been a lot of attention paid
to the case of the congressman from New York.
Republican Congressman-elect George Santos.
[Reporter] Santos trying to minimize his lies
as mere embellishments.
Republican Congressman-elect Santos says
he is not going to step down.
I think it's very unlikely
that in a vibrant local news environment,
he would've been elected.
Reporters would have asked him questions.
When they didn't get straight answers,
they would've asked the question again.
When you don't have local reporters
covering those local races, people slip through.
Less accountability for government officials
has been shown to result in higher taxes,
corruption, and environmental crises.
Let's look at what happened in Flint, Michigan,
with its water crisis.
In April of 2014, the town of Flint changed its water source
from Lake Huron to the Flint River.
In May of that year, The Flint Journal,
a four-times-a-week local news source,
was already reporting on the story.
And they stayed with it until it became national news.
But it took 9 months of reporting
before any outlet outside of Flint covered the crisis.
Residents of Flint are part of multiple communities
that have long been underrepresented
and under credited in national news coverage.
Now, what would've happened to the people of Flint,
who are a community who were raising concerns,
without The Flint Journal?
How many Flint water crises are we missing
because there's no one covering them?
The Flint Journal is just one example.
Many other local news outlets have uncovered massive crimes
with wide-ranging impacts.
Reporters of The Boston Globe
were the first to reveal abuses
in the Catholic Church in Boston.
A Miami Herald investigative journalist
exposed sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
after identifying and interviewing
dozens of alleged victims.
IndyStar reporters broke the story
on Larry Nassar's longtime child sexual abuse.
Without local journalists to uncover these stories,
exploitation, abuse, and corruption slip through the cracks.
On the flip side, moving beyond sensationalist,
'if it bleeds, it leads' coverage of crime
becomes more difficult when local journalists
don't have the resources to dig deep
or investment in thoughtful storytelling
from the powers that be.
Clearly, local journalism is at a crossroads,
so what can be done?
Revitalizing local news will require investments
that collectively total billions of dollars,
and that cannot come from a single source,
but will require concerted action
from philanthropic, private, and public sectors.
We support the federal government doing 3 things
to support local news.
The first is to stop the rampant consolidation
and nationalization of news.
The second is to create a commission
that will study what the federal government needs to do
to provide support to local news organizations,
and specifically, they should consider how
and how much public funding to give to these sources.
And third, they should pass tax credits
that help support people to be able to purchase news sources
and help support news sources to remain in business
at this critical time.
I'm hopeful that there's a market out there
for good journalism.
I believe there is.
I believe there's a lot of good people out there
who care about truth and who care about reality.
They need to put their money where their hopes are.
[solemn music]