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JohnClaytonSecondPaper 5 - 17 Apr 2021 - Main.JohnClayton
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Still, York is lucky. Many community newspapers have vanished altogether, their audiences and ad dollars sucked away by the tech platforms. Roughly a quarter of newspapers and half of local journalism jobs have disappeared in the last 15 years. Researchers now study the phenomenon of “news deserts”—large swaths of the country, particularly rural areas, that have no local news coverage. | |
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< | For an informational democracy to thrive, we must resurrect local news. The government has a vital interest in creating a sustainable, digital local news infrastructure. Indeed, under the First Amendment’s non-abridgement principle, it may have an obligation to. | >
> | For an informational democracy to thrive, we must resurrect local news. The government has a vital interest in creating a sustainable, digital local news infrastructure. Indeed, under the First Amendment’s non-abridgment principle, it may have an obligation to. | | | The Need for Local News in an Informational Democracy | | | The priorities of an informational democracy must include a renewed focus on sustainable, community-based news reporting. Accountability journalism discourages and exposes corruption by local officials who otherwise operate without oversight. But robust local news coverage has also been linked to more holistic benefits, like increased voter turnout, greater civic participation, and reduced political polarization. Local media even play a role in alerting public health officials to the spread of disease—a now-salient concern in the time of COVID-19. | |
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< | The Case for a Non-Abridgement Obligation | >
> | The Case for a Non-Abridgment Obligation | | | The for-profit news media bears much blame for its collapse. Bloated media organizations tied themselves to a for-profit, ad-based business model. Audiences moved online and advertisers migrated to the platforms, with their troves of user data. In one sense, the death of for-profit print media is merely a story of technological disruption. | | | Conversely, more recent federal actions have exacerbated the decline in local news. The decision to immunize, via Section 230, the tech platforms from liability for third-party statements is perhaps the most obvious example. This immunity fed the growth of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which freely leveraged news articles while siphoning away the ad dollars that sustained those articles. Meanwhile, the loosening of merger rules by the FCC—including its recent decision to permit increased broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership in markets—has led to even greater media homogeneity. This is particularly true for broadcast news, where cross-packaging of content means that less airtime is devoted to local affairs. | |
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< | Under a non-abridgement First Amendment, one could argue the government has not just an interest, but an obligation to remedy the news deserts whose growth it helped hasten. | >
> | Under a non-abridgment First Amendment, one could argue the government has not just an interest, but an obligation to remedy the news deserts whose growth it helped hasten. | | | Building Digital Infrastructure for Local News |
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