Local media should be a particular focus. National media may have their problems with trust, but local news, where engagement with community and the larger world begins, is disappearing altogether. Over the past two decades, according to the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, nearly 40 percent of all local newspapers have shut down, leaving 50 million Americans with little or no reliable news about their communities. That includes Friday-night high-school football scores, official decisions at city-commission meetings, and data about local crime. The result is that people are disengaged from their communities. Politics is more polarized, voter turnout in local elections is lower, and fewer public officials are held accountable. Some initiatives are trying to fill the gap. The American Journalism Project, for example, gives grants to local nonprofit news organizations, helps communities start new outlets, and provides coaching for newsroom leaders.
Only when we share the same facts can we begin to have a healthy debate about what they mean and what should be done about them. And then, hopefully, we can start rebuilding the other institutions that have undergirded our democracy for nearly two and a half centuries, and that got us through the Watergate years. Perhaps that will allow us to move on from a president who posted an AI video of himself wearing a crown and flying an airplane dumping excrement on millions of his fellow citizens.
Gerald Ford gave us the way forward the day he was sworn in: “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men,” he said. “Here the people rule.”
