If you’re as confused as I am by recent elections, in which voters chose neophytes promising the moon over incumbents doing a decent job, you may appreciate two new reports.
They shed light on how elections are being negatively affected by the news industry’s struggles. I’m not sure how this will improve without a local journalism renaissance.
One found that only 36% of Americans now follow the news closely, down from 51% in 2016.
Attention to news declined steadily over the last decade and then plunged this year, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
So 64% aren’t paying much attention, which affects their ability to independently evaluate candidates’ performance and proposals.
Following the news provides a baseline understanding of what’s happening. Without that, voters are more vulnerable to getting spun by political campaigns peddling soundbites and stereotypes.
Pew found attention fell for every age group and among both Republicans and Democrats.
Young adults, under 30, have always been the least likely to regularly follow the news. Pew found only 15% of them are now following news “all or most of the time,” down from 27% in 2016.
They are voracious followers of social media, however, with 66% visiting YouTube daily, 49% on Facebook daily and 47% on TikTok daily, according to an earlier Pew report.
News may cross their screens but they weren’t necessarily looking for it, Katerina Eva Matsa, Pew’s director of news and information research, told me.
“Younger people are more likely to say they just, you know, stumble upon news content, rather than the older folks … they are more likely than younger people to say I went looking for it,” she said.
Of course everyone’s fatigued by the nonstop outrage generated by the White House and terrible stories of war and suffering abroad. People need a break.
Local news is usually less divisive but there’s less to follow nowadays. America’s newspapers, which do most local reporting, lost three-fourths of their staff and 39% of them closed since 2005.
In their diminished state, they produce less original, serious reporting. Most regional newspapers have reduced their distribution and print frequency, breaking the daily news habit of their most loyal readers.
More people watch TV news than read newspapers. But the number of TV stations reporting local news is declining, as owners cut costs following consolidation.
The other study found that local news is critical to nurturing candidates for local office, where most political careers begin.
Local news “can provide potential candidates with the background and knowledge about their local government that may mobilize them to consider a candidacy,” wrote professors Danny Hayes at George Washington University and Jennifer Lawless at the University of Virginia.
As local news declines, the pool of candidates is diminished, and candidates may emerge with priorities other than local governance, they wrote in their draft paper, “All Ambition is Local: News Consumption and the Decision to Run for Office.”
“Not only may the increasingly anemic local news environment make it less likely that people will consider running for local office, but it may also leave the pool of candidates comprised of people whose primary goal has little to do with serving their local communities,” they wrote.
That made me shudder after November’s election and so many local candidates campaigning on federal issues.
Still, I’m a big fan of these professors. Their 2021 book “News Hole” definitively showed how the decline of newspapers, and cuts in government coverage by those that remain, lead to civic illiteracy and disengagement.
They found that 58% of people who don’t read local papers couldn’t name their mayor and 84% couldn’t name their schools’ superintendent. That was based on surveys in 2019, before the recent decline in people closely following news.
In an interview, Hayes suggested that Pew’s findings may not be as bad as they sound. There’s not “a cratering of the news audience,” he said, and the 51% level in 2016 may have been a high-water mark because of President Donald Trump’s first election.
“You’re not seeing people just, basically, completely disengaging,” he explained. “You’re seeing sort of a reduction in the intensity of people’s news consumption.”
Hayes suggested there’s an argument that maybe it’s good for people to be less hooked on the national news stream.
The bigger concern is that they’re getting less local news, especially if social media is where they’re getting informed.
Social media algorithms are more likely to surface national news because it’s more scalable and builds more engagement, while local news generally isn’t interesting beyond a geographic area, he said.
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“So I think the tendency of people to sort of outsource their news consumption to social media platforms is another way that the world, the world of news, is just very much discriminating against local information,” he said.
That adds to concerns about how voters are getting informed and the motivations of emerging candidates.
“If you have a generation of people coming of age whose motivations to enter into politics are not shaped as strongly by local news, you might get a very different set of candidates running for office,” Hayes said. “You might get leaders who just are not as closely attuned to the concerns of the local constituents that they are representing, people who are more concerned with their national partisan ambitions or their engagement with culture wars or whatever the other kinds of things that might motivate people to run.”
Whether these trends can be reversed is unclear. But to me they’re all the more reason to revive America’s local, independent press system.
This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.
