Complete Story
01/27/2015
The decline of local news is threatening citizen engagement
When the White House announced last week that President Obama would grant interviews to three YouTube stars after Tuesday’s State of the Union address, it not only marked the first time “fartbag” made its way into media coverage of the august annual speech. It also served as yet another reminder of how the evolving media environment is reshaping Washington politics.
As important as these changes might be, it’s easy to forget that perhaps an even more politically consequential shift in the media landscape is happening at the local level. New research by me and American University political science professor Jennifer Lawless suggests that the impoverishment of local political news in recent years is driving down citizen engagement.
Lawless and I aren’t the first to explore a link between the changing local news environment and political engagement. Previous work has shown that the recent deaths of newspapers in big cities — such as Cincinnati, Denver and Seattle — have coincided with lower levels of civic participation. With fewer outlets providing public affairs information, voters appear less politically active.
But our analysis, based on a large-scale study of local coverage and citizen behavior in every congressional district across the country, demonstrates that the fading of two-newspaper towns is not the only problem. When the content of local news deteriorates — as has happened nationwide in an era of newsroom austerity — so do citizen knowledge and participation.
