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New Deserts and Non-Abridgment: Supporting Informational Democracy by Reviving Local News

-- By JohnClayton - 17 Apr 2021

Introduction

I three years out of undergrad working as a reporter in York, Pennsylvania, a small city whose affairs were nonetheless chronicled by not one, but two daily newspapers. I worked at the morning paper; our counterparts published in the afternoon. Given the modest scope of our coverage area—two mostly rural counties—our newsroom was well-stocked. Two dozen or so reporters, plus desk staff. Plenty to cover local politics, school board meetings, Friday night football games, and the like.

Today, less than half that staff remains. A conglomerate bought us and outsourced jobs to a centralized editing hub. Our competitor is not doing much better. It is hard to imagine York will stay a two-newspaper town for much longer.

Still, York is lucky. Local print and digital news organizations across the country have shriveled, their audiences and ad dollars sucked away by the tech platforms. 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.

For an informational democracy to thrive, we must resurrect local news. The government has an interest in creating a sustainable and digitally based local news infrastructure. Indeed, under the First Amendment’s non-abridgement principle, it may have an obligation to.

The Need for Local News in an Informational Democracy

The founders knew well the importance of a thriving press that circulated news and information to all corners of the country. James Madison argued that only an informed and engaged public could expose “public characters and measures” to the censorship of public opinion—the country’s “real sovereign”—and preserve, through informed voting, a government subservient to the People.

In theory, the ubiquity of the internet should make the circulation of news easier. We no longer need “good roads,” but only good spectrum. But our new media ecosystem has not worked out that way. The algorithmic marketplace of attention-consuming ideas is not suited to the bread-and-butter mundanities of local journalism: not only local elections and updates from city hall, but human-interest stories that increase one’s connection to their community.

The priorities of an informational democracy must include a renewed focus on creating in sustainable, community-based news operations. At the most basic level, accountability journalism discourages and exposes corruption by local officials who otherwise operate without oversight. But the presence of newspapers in a community has also been linked to more holistic benefits, like increased voter turnout, greater civic participation, and reduced political polarization. Local media can also play a vital role in alerting public health officials to the spread of disease—a salient concern in the time of COVID-19.

The Case for a Non-Abridgement Obligation

The for-profit news media bears much blame for its own collapse. For decades, bloated media organizations tied themselves to a for-profit, ad-based business model. Audiences moved online and advertisers migrated to the platforms and their troves of user targeting data. In one sense, the death of for-profit media, including local news outlets, is merely a story of technological disruption.

This is part of the story, to be sure, but not all of it. The government has long played a central role in structuring the media ecosystem, including local and print media. Newspapers, for example, received special treatment that allowed them to grow—such as insulation from tax and antitrust laws. Indeed, York’s two newspapers take advantage of a federal law carve out that allows them to pool advertising, printing, and circulation operations.

Conversely, more recent federal actions have likely exacerbated the decline in local news. The decision to immunize, via Section 230, the tech platforms from liability for third-party comments is perhaps the most egregious example. This immunity helped facilitate the dramatic growth of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, who freely leveraged news articles as attentional lures while siphoning away the ad dollars that once sustained the same outlets. 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 less and less air-time is devoted to non-crime-related local news.

Thus, a colorable argument exists that, under a non-abridgement reading of the First Amendment, the government’s has an obligation to take remedial action to remedy the growth of news deserts that it helped hasten. The question then becomes what that action should be.

Building Digital Infrastructure for Local News

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