“It often happens in democratic countries,” he continues,
that many men who have the desire or the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.
A vibrant press is one of the forces that helps shape individuals into members of a community with responsibilities and obligations toward that community. It acculturates them into political life and ties them to other, like-minded people.
That’s one reason that throughout American history, whenever there is a reform movement, there are newspapers and journalists associated with that reform movement, whether it’s the temperance movement or the abolition movement or the labor movement.
One of the most striking aspects of the modern information environment, as many people have observed, is the almost total collapse of local and even regional news outlets. Where once every town or city of even minor consequence had a newspaper — with reporters who helped the community understand itself through their work — now there are large parts of the country that exist in news deserts, where there is little coverage of anything, from local government to local events.
I think that this decline has played an important role in undermining America’s democratic institutions, as well as the public’s faith in democracy. It’s not just that the collapse of local news has made it harder to hold any number of public officials accountable — contributing to general cynicism about the ability of government to do anything constructive — but that Americans increasingly lack the information they need to participate in the political process in their communities.
“As Americans have shifted away from local news, turnout in state and local elections has fallen,” notes Brookings, “and communities that have lost reporters have seen fewer candidates run for local office.”
Americans have turned to national news and national news outlets to close the gap, but these larger institutions can’t replace what has been lost. By virtue of proximity, I can respond more easily when a local official is accused of wrongdoing. The same isn’t true of a member of Congress, especially if they aren’t my own. The information we get from national outlets is valuable, but it can also leave us feeling hopeless and impotent. And it can contribute to “political hobbyism,” a tendency to treat politics not as a cause for action and an essential part of citizenship, but as a game where the only goal — the only objective — is to somehow embarrass and humiliate our enemies.
There has always been an element of entertainment in politics — it’s part of living in a mass democracy — but the total devolution of politics into entertainment may have something to do with the absence of institutions that link our political awareness to something more local, something more concrete, than national political conflict.