A Facebook comment from Moberly noted last week: “The Moberly Monitor-Index (once a daily, now a weekly) made a brief reference to the situation on its Facebook account today as well, but I didn’t see anything on its website. Aside from any TV coverage from Columbia, that’s going to be the only local news outlet henceforth.”

The comment was about Alpha Media’s layoffs of all on-air employees at radio stations in Moberly, turning the station into just another satellite-provided bunch of programs with no local relevance.

The comment points to another alarming trend—the death of the local newspaper.

Small and medium-market newspapers have been swallowed up by Gatehouse (or as a friend of mine from one of those newspapers calls it, “Guthouse”) Media, including the Gannett chain.  Gatehouse now uses that name—Gannett, and other newspaper conglomerates.

The practice has been to buy small or medium market newspapers, hollow out the staffs, turn dailies into weeklies and weeklies into digital products as much as possible, again to the detriment of the local markets but to the great financial benefit of the corporation.

With gutted local newspapers and gutted local radio stations, we are seeing more and more news deserts being created.

At a time when we as a nation and we as a state desperately need more eyes on newsmakers and more diverse voices in our social dialogue—and more attention to local issues—we are getting less and what we are getting shows no industrial responsibility to giving consumers diverse viewpoints.

The corporate monopolization of our mass media is one of the greatest threats our country faces but one that gets little public attention.

More than a century ago this nation was crippled by the power of trusts, whether it was steel or petroleum or transportation trusts (even baking powder, which triggered Missouri’s biggest political scandal early in the last century) that limited competition  and put acquisition of corporate wealth above public interest, convenience, and necessity in so many parts of American life.

We are there again and media control is one of the most dangerous of all of those trusts.  Dwindling sources of information and increasing control of the remaining sources increases our national weakness.

An ignorant nation cannot be a free nation. And Alpha and Gannett/Gatehouse and their ilk are among the corporations that are controlling more and more of our information sources and reducing local service, replacing it with national voices that probably could not point to a map and show you where Festus, Moberly, Farmington, Lebanon or Bethany Missouri are.

Some degree of re-regulation of broadcasting is warranted requiring meeting a certain level of local responsibility. Some degree of trust-busting to provide an opportunity for more independence of opinion in our media is increasingly necessary.

While government can play a role—a carefully modulated role—in these ares is not beyond consideration, the ultimate responsibility for demanding greater diversity in media voces lies with the listeners, readers, and viewers of our electronic communications.

Letters to the FCC and to congressional delegations from places like these communities can carry some weight in Washington.  Boycotts from local advertisers, many of whom already rely on direct-mail or independent internet messaging, can carry weight with corporate broadcasting owners.

Newspaper corporations have one important thing that broadcasters do not have—the First Amendment. Government control of newspapers, as the FCC exerts licensing control over broadcasters, cannot exist and should not exist.

How anti-trust laws could be applied to newspaper conglomerates will be a difficult conversation, even more difficult than the conversations about internet abuses, although similar when the First Amendment enters the discussion.

Nonetheless, all of us are victims of those who control increasing percentages of our media outlets and see no responsibility for diversity of thought and opinion or of local involvement. We are victims only so long as we allow ourselves to be victims, only so long as we refuse to seek out challenges to our own ideas.

Why should we fear that?  Why should we let others tell us what to think and regard those who think differently as enemies?

The trusts were broken when they became so oppressive that the public forced governments to act.

We have reached that point now in our information industry. And we should not accept it.