A new FCC report finds that local news coverage, especially reporting on state and local government, has shifted power to government officials, to the detriment of democracy.
The New York Times reports:
Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged, concluded the study, which is to be released on Thursday.
“In many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting,” said the study, which was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission and written by Steven Waldman, a former journalist for Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism — going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy — is in some cases at risk at the local level.”
A copy of the report has already been posted on Scribd.com, although the FCC site was overloaded when I tried to download it directly this morning.
There’s also a good story on Stateline, “Can nonprofit news survive?”
The reviews of the FCC report are not all rosy. See, for example, this review from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, or this reaction from Scholars & Rogues:
Well, duh. As for newspapers, the FCC could have saved some money by reading critiques of press performance at S&R here and here, many posts at Alan Mutter’s “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog, this piece by newspaper-industry analyst John Morton’s column in American Journalism Review. Or follow @themediaisdying on Twitter. Or Pew’s “State of the News Media” series. Or it could have just weighed a copy of my local newspaper from 10 years ago and compared it with its featherlight weight today.
Or the FCC could have just kept track of the tens of thousands of daily print journalists who’ve lost their jobs through layoffs or buyouts over the past five years. For many who follow diminished quantity of good local reporting, especially local government reporting, the results of the FCC’s study are no surprise.
In any case, lots of reading here for news hounds to digest.
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I like the comment about weighing today’s newspaper and comparing it with 10 years ago. I have made a similar observation recently commenting to my wife that the Saturday SA is not even enough to take into the bathroom to… you know.
On my dresser there is still a section of the sunday of august 16, 2009 edition of the Honolulu advertiser entitled “50 who steered the course of statehood”. The section was so thick that I never had the chance to finish reading it, and it is so good that I don’t want to toss it. Next time you want to go to the bathroom, come on over to my house and you can read it. There is nothing like that today, it seems almost like a grand extravagance.
In the future we will all have to get iPads in order to read civil beat in the bathroom.
Thank goodness Civil Beat is on the internet. Now we are seeing investigative reporting much to the chargine of those being investigated.