Local news coverage suffers from the same problems as national news

A short companion to Herald Leader goes all in for East Egg’s parks tax.

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It is probably not much of a secret, but trust in the media is at record lows. We trust the media even less than we trust the scuzzballs in Congress. “Nearly four in 10 Americans completely lack confidence in the media,” a Gallup news report states about the findings of its annual poll, “to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.”

Put differently: to a substantial number of Americans, the democratic function of journalism, which is to inform citizens by being a watchdog over power, has seemingly tipped into propaganda, the selective use of data and story to market the ideas of a specific ruling class interest.

That can’t be good.

We normally locate this lost media trust nationally. Indeed, the Gallup poll emphasizes mass media. We don’t trust news that comes from Fox News or MSNBC or NPR or other media outlets with great market power and territorial reach. Or we attribute the loss of trust to–the seeming answer to all things disconcerting since 2015–the demagogue and billionaire Donald Trump screaming about fake news. Or to #Russiagate hoaxes that never add up, or to George Soros or (the new boogies) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for over-riding editorial boards and tipping algorithms.

When it comes to local media, though, the story is different. At least according to a Knight Foundation poll, we still believe in our local media to report the news accurately and to follow the right stories for informing citizens and acting as a legitimate community watchdog.

This is what we might call the CivicLex view of local media: small-fry apolitical journalists buck the national trends to become trusted sources of local news who make important contributions to the civic health of their community. (Unsurprisingly, CivicLex is a multi-grant recipient of Knight Foundation money.)

Me, I’m not so sure.

I am, admittedly, limited to my own mid-size city’s media environment. But the rosy viewpoint seems heavily influenced by localist propaganda. My hunch is that the positive public perception of local media is shallow and based largely on the fact that, in a nation geographically divided into blue-dot cities and red-state territories, we consume local news that is already directed toward a hyper-partisan audience. In blue-dot Lexington, it’s like having MSNBC on all day in the background.

The hyper-partisan background noise allows us to project a certain confidence about the legitimacy and goodness of “our” people for delivering us a local news that is mostly relieved from having to engage with oppositional or dissenting explanations. We may occasionally read about factional infighting within the uniparty (as when Linda Blackford gets her cackles up), but for the most part what we have locally is consensus reporting by people who are personally familiar with their subjects.

Few really follow local news anyway, except for the people and organizations like CivicLex who directly benefit from the reporting–and who build their brand directly through personal relations of the subjects we trust them to cover. As a community, we may express a lot of partisan awareness about the ins and outs of Trump or Biden tax giveways—but we’ll know next to nothing about the local tax breaks that get handed out like candy to a handful of Lexington’s most connected folks.

If we did have that interest and awareness, I doubt that our views on local journalism would be so rosy. We’d most likely view it in the same degraded manner in which we rightly view our national media.