On Media: The Impact of News Deserts
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air, about her new book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.”
The 37-minute interview is well-worth a listen if you didn’t already catch it live. Sullivan and fill-in host Dave Davies do an incredible job summing up the current state of local journalism, and discuss many of the challenges and innovations facing the news business today.
One of the most important things the two talked about was the increase in news deserts and the impact the lack of accountability they foster for elected officials. She cited a specific example from the 2018 mid-term election when Democratic challenger Nate McMurray ran against Republican Rep. Chris Collins in New York’s 27th Congressional District, which comprises the area between Buffalo and Rochester. That Collins lost by less than 1,000 votes in a deeply red district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 was certainly a major headline. But even more noteworthy, says Sullivan, was that Collins received a federal indictment for insider trading three months before the election. Yet, despite that indictment, whenever McMurray campaigned in rural parts of the district, he encountered voters who were incredulous – or completely ignorant – about their representative’s wrong-doing, due to a lack of local news outlets. And when McMurray would try to inform the voters about Collins’s indictment, he would be accused of peddling fake news. This completely floored McMurray.
“But he could understand it because he thought that people were getting a lot of their information from less dependable sources – social media, talk radio and just what he called rumors,” said Sullivan. “In the parts of the district that had more local news and were more sort of immersed in local news coverage, a lot of people crossed the aisle to vote for the challenger… But in the parts of the district that had less local news… that didn’t happen nearly as much.”
And then, as if you couldn’t see this coming a mile away, ten months after Collins won re-election to the seat, he was forced to resign after pleading guilty, accepted a 26-month prison term (which he has yet to start serving, because of the virus, by the way) and given a $200,000 fine. McMurray hasn’t given up, incidentally. After narrowing losing a special election on June 23 to replace the departing Collins (to Republican State Senator Chris Jacobs), McMurray has vowed to run again this November. For those keeping track, that’s three stabs at the same Congressional seat in less than two years!
(If the subject of news deserts interests you, by the way, check out this recent piece in the Wisconsin Examiner about how they have influenced awareness and attitudes about the pandemic… and this explainer with links to additional coverage by the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media… and this site (with maps) dedicated to the issue, by Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at UNC.)
There was a lot of other great stuff in the interview with Sullivan, including discussions about many of the innovations that organizations are pursuing in local media today. One additional item they discussed that caught my attention, and that I’d love to write about further in a future piece, is Report For America, an initiative of the nonprofit Groundtruth Project.
Report for America is a national service program – akin to City Year or a domestic Peace Corps – that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms for up to two years, to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America currently pays for about half the salary of the journalists, while the other half is paid by local news organizations that host the service journalists.
They’re currently supporting 226 emerging journalists spread across 46 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico… with a goal to place 1,000 reporters in newsrooms by 2024. It’s an impressive model that, with the proper support, have an enormous impact.