S6 E25: Celebrity Politics, Expensive Sports, and the Fight for Local News

But one of the things that I want to talk about, and it doesn't generate a lot of clicks, doesn't trend on your socials, and rarely leads a cable news broadcast, but it may be one of the biggest threats facing those of us that like to be informed in the United States today, and that's the disappearance of local news.

Now, before you tune out and say, hey, JQ, I can get my news online, just hear me out for a second.

This isn't whether about you find headlines on your phone or iPad.

It's about whether anyone is actually covering what's going on in your community.

And now that I'm in a new area, I see it because there was...

The area that I'm in now once had a local paper, and the local paper doesn't even have offices in the town anymore.

They're an hour away, owned by a...

I'm not going to say a major conglomerate, but a conglomerate of newspapers.

So, you know...

The way I look at it is that if nobody's watching our city hall, the school boards, the county legislatures, even the local courts, who's going to hold those institutions accountable? And that's a question that I think every American needs to care about.

Now over the past 20 years or so, thousands of local newspapers have either closed entirely or dramatically reduced their staff.

Some communities that once held daily newspapers now only have weekly publications.

And others have no local news outlets at all.

Those areas are what they're terming as news deserts.

You may get hyper local news on your social media, but not every community has them.

Now, let's think about that phrase, news desert, for a moment.

A place where information about local government, public spending, school policies, zoning decisions, and community issues simply doesn't exist, or it only exists in a very limited format.

Now we often talk about freedom of the press as one of the pillars of the First Amendment but freedom of the press only works if there actually is a press.

I mean if you live in North Jersey let's say or the suburbs of Connecticut and your news is coming out of New York City...

How much of that stuff are they actually reporting for your area? It's not going to be a whole lot.

It's got to be something that's got to really grab the attention of the news directors and the reporters and whatnot.

Now, the founders didn't include freedom of the press because they thought newspapers would be profitable business.

They included it because it informed the citizenry business.

And that is essential to self-government.

You can't effectively govern yourself if you don't know what your government is doing.