The Unmooring of America
Why does it feel like Americans have become unmoored? Decades-old laws are undone, extremes dominate, comedians get attacked onstage, and Americans are unable to agree on whether a President was rightfully elected or not.
Jonathan Haidt wrote an excellent piece for the Atlantic “Why Americans Have Lost Their Minds,” which attributed much of the problem to social media. “Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.”
Haidt calls it the ‘fragmentation of everything’ as “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”
Haidt identifies ‘extensive social networks with high levels of trust.’ What had been the mortar that held towns and communities together? One part of it was the local paper. People reading about high school sports or the bridge needing repair or the local charity drive were sharing an experience and perspective.
At the same time that social media was rising, local news was dying. More than two thousand local newspapers went out of business between 2005 and 2020 – over thirteen hundred towns and counties now have no local news source at all. We talk a lot about journalists in American life but the reality is that thirty thousand rank-and-file reporters lost their jobs between 2008 and 2019, and the local reporter is increasingly an endangered species.
Local papers have been tied to higher turnout in local elections, more candidates running, quality of governance and even lower cost of municipal bonds. Said a former city council person to me in a medium-sized town, “I remember when we had city council meetings. Then, because of budget cuts, the reporter stopped coming. You could sense a change immediately. People’s professionalism slipped. We were more likely to cut corners. We got less done or more done with less care.”
Even more fundamentally, it’s hard to have an identity tied to your local community if your town doesn’t share stories.
Recognizing the magnitude of the problem, some people are trying to fix it. Elizabeth Green started Chalkbeat, a non-profit periodical to cover local educational issues. Steve Waldman co-founded Report for America, another non-profit to fund young journalists.
Tara McGowan, whom I interviewed on the podcast this week has a different approach. Tara started out as a journalist for CBS on 60 Minutes. She worked in Democratic politics for years on digital strategy. At some point she became deeply concerned about both local news deserts and misinformation.
So she founded Courier Newsroom in 2019. Courier operates digital local newspapers in Iowa, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other locations. Courier is a left-leaning civic journalism company that delivers political information around fact-based articles like “21 spots to go on a daytrip.”
Says Tara, “Disinformation is most dangerous in a vacuum . . . if we don’t protect democracy nothing else matters, every business’s interest is tied to this, every philanthropist’s interest is tied to this - if you’re not addressing the information ecosystem problem and incentive structure in this country, you’re not addressing any of those problems [like climate change] in a meaningful way.”
Some could take issue with the fact that a publisher like Courier with an express political bent is furnishing local news. As you’d imagine, propagandists from the right have been fast and active in filling the local news vacuum. For example, in 2020, 80 local news sites in California were identified as a “pay-for-play” propaganda network tied to Republican operatives and corporate P.R. firms who wanted to place favorable stories. Sinclair is often regarded as a right-leaning purveyor of local news. The void will be filled by those with the most to gain.
In my mind, we should see local journalism as a public good that is funded philanthropically or via public-private partnerships. A number of representatives have proposed the bi-partisan Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which would help give local newspapers tax credits and a fighting chance. As usual given the dysfunction in Washington, the bill’s prospects are dim.
How do we give Americans a sense of cohesion and stability again? It’s going to be tough to get the country on the same page again. It certainly makes sense to build from the ground up, and start with your hometown.
