A friend has passed along an article written a few years ago by Jonathan Bernstein, a columnist on the Bloomberg Views website in which he lamented that the “demise of local news may be ruining Congress.” Bernstein wrote that several senators facing re-election found that “no one in their home states knows who they are.” He cited a piece by Washington Post writer Paul Kane, who saids, “A prime cause of this fight for name recognition is the increasingly fragmented media in which partisans largely receive their news from ideologically driven cable news and social media. Middle-of-the-road voters, reliant on their local news, are often left in the dark.”
Kane noted, “Overall, there are more reporters covering Congress than ever, except they increasingly write for inside Washington publications whose readers are lawmakers, lobbyists and Wall Street investors.” He cites North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, began his Washington career in the House before moving to the Senate in 2005. When he arrived in Washington, three newspapers from North Carolina had Washington Bureaus. Now, none of them do. “I can give a major policy speech, and no newspaper in Charlotte or Raleigh or Winston-Salem will even cover that I was there, much less that I gave a policy speech.”
Bernstein offers a scenario: The president proposes a new initiative. If the local newspaper has a Washington bureau, a member of Congress might figure out how district voters feel and then endorse whatever constituents want. The constituents can then read the news coverage in the local paper. But that’s not how things work anymore.
He wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season. So the safest bet for an incumbent is going to be to echo the party line (which will normally mean no coverage at all) or, better, just to keep his or her mouth shut. Why stick with the district’s needs over party loyalty when no one in the district will ever hear about it — except the die-hards who support the party line no matter what?”
He also worried that the changing face of the news business works against the local Senator or Representative proposing things that benefit the district. “If the rewards for action are reduced, fewer and fewer members of Congress are going to bother,” he says. The end result: “The demise of state and local political reporting is often thought of as a potential threat because without a vigorous press, no one will expose malfeasance, and politicians will have weaker reasons to avoid corruption. But perhaps the reduced incentives for good behavior by these elected officials are an even bigger reason to despair.”
This is not just a national issue. It is a matter of concern in every state. The same concerns Bernstein voices apply to our state and city governments.
There probably are fewer reporters covering state capitols full-time than there are reporters covering Congress. Newspapers from St. Joseph, Cape Girardeau, Springfield, and Joplin once had year-around reporters at the capitol. Not today, although Springfield still sends a reporter to the Capitol during sessions. There once were two wire services covering state government. The Associated Press is the only one left. Second newspapers from Kansas City and St. Louis went out of business years ago. Don’t expect to learn much from metropolitan TV or radio stations about what’s happening in Jefferson City although what happens at the capitol affects their viewers every minute of their lives. Missouri Independent, a new and aggressive news organization whose articles appear in several newspapers, is an important addition and works hard to fill the yawning gap in coverage of state government and politics.
Missouri newspaper subscribers are more likely to get their news about state politics and government from weekly columns written by their legislators than they are to read anything from a local reporter that details or questions what the local lawmaker is doing or saying because few local news outlets have anyone focusing on covering the actions of their area lawmakers. The weekly columns from office holders must not be acceptable substitutes for reporters who are the fires to which political feet are held.
The situation is worse when it comes to local radio or television news telling of what lawmakers or even city council members are doing. The corporatization of radio stations has eliminated many vigorous local news departments. When stations that once had people covering city hall, the courthouse, the school board, and other local events become only one of a half dozen (or more) formats under one roof—and sometimes not even in the same town they are licensed for—with one person who does some news on all of the stations only during morning drive, citizens are not well-informed.
And in an election year, the voters are left to the mercy of manipulative commercials and partisan podcasts.
The economics and the technology of the news business have changed. In general, those changes have led to more concerns about the bottom line and less concerns about informing the increasingly less-educated, more self-centered electorate who make up a political system that favors agendas over broad public service. The public is in danger of being the frog in the pot of water not realizing it is being boiled to death.
It has been observed that the best thing to happen to newspapers in many towns is the disappearance of local radio news. People have only the local newspaper to turn to if they want to know about events at city hall and elsewhere. But it is unlikely those newspapers have anybody specifically assigned to make local and federal legislators accountable to their constituents. And in too many instances, local newspapers have come under ownerships that have no local commitments and thus provide few safeguards against poor public policy to their readers.
Some cities are fortunate that new owners step in who have a dedication to their communities and who believe in the responsibility the press has to them.
It is easy to blame the media for the shortcomings in political awareness among the public. But to do so is to ignore the responsibility that we, the public, carry in a free society. Bernstein spoke of irresponsibility when he wrote, “More and more politically active voters get their news from national partisan TV, radio and digital outlets. Less engaged voters can easily tune out all political news, at least until the height of election season.”
If we despair of today’s politics, we must despair of ourselves. While the too-often bottom-line-only news media share the blame (some might say “the credit) for what we have become as a political people, we cannot escape our own personal civic responsibility to pay attention, to ignore the manipulator and the self-serving promoter, to question claims and concepts, to ask if those who claim they can do anything unilaterally really have the power to do so in a three-branch system of checks and balances, and to evaluate, think, and act for ourselves. Citizens cannot allow themselves to be victims of “the demise of local news.” It is better to live and ask questions than to exist and accept self-serving answers or comfortable assurances.
Think about that as we sit in the pan of water while the political stove gets hotter.
You can read Bernstein’s article at : https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-31/demise-of-local-news-may-be-ruining-congress
0000