| >Why? Because the majority of people prefer mindless trash to the idiosyncrasies of a local county commission meeting. >I don't have a good answer because media companies have to make money to stay in business. Making them backed by the state is an even worse idea. An excellent point. Local media outlets (in the US at least, not sure about elsewhere) are few and far between these days. We need local news that focuses on "county commission meetings" and other happenings of local concern. Unfortunately, unless you're in a big media market (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Boston, etc.), odds are that your "local" news is written by folks hundreds of miles away, with no real understanding of local issues. Here in NYC, we have dozens of local papers, blogs, independent news sites and local TV news outlets. As such, coverage of local issues is quite good. But the days of small towns/counties having their own local newspapers and TV news are long gone in the US. Anyone not living in a big media market will likely get only the broad-brush, zero nuance reporting that comes from national/regional news outlets. That's a big problem for small towns, as there's no one with "skin in the game" watching the goings on of local and state government actors. I don't have a solution (sadly) for this issue, because local news outlets in small media markets had a hard time staying in business long before the Internet, and the loss of classified ads in those small markets killed local journalism. And so we have big national players like Fox, CNN, WSJ, NYT, USA Today, etc. that provide coverage of national issues and very limited (and inferior to real local reporting) coverage of regional/local issues. This leads to really poor governance at the state and local levels and a lack of nuance about regional/national issues as they relate to local populations/economies. More's the pity. |
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...