When thinking about the harms caused by the collapse of local news, our minds might first turn to the practical: Less local news means more corruption, more government waste, and meager knowledge of candidates for local office. More recent research has also found that the local news crisis exacerbates polarization and misinformation. When community news contracts, the vacuum is filled by national media (more partisan) and social media (optimized for anger, misinformation-friendly). That got Danny Hayes, a professor of political science at The George Washington University, wondering: If local news influences communal feelings, could it also influence personal feelings? His recent study is stunning. He and researcher Anusha Trivedi compared levels of individual loneliness in comparable communities, some with robust local news and others without. They found that those with less community news had higher levels of loneliness, especially in rural areas. In a state that is half rural, a 10-point increase in the share of the state’s low-news counties leads to a 1.4-point increase in loneliness. Then they examined local news consumption in a nationally representative sample and found a similar pattern. Those who consume more local news were less lonely than those who didn’t. Then, Rebuild Local News and Muckrack, as part of its annual Local Journalist index released this week, explored the data from a different angle. The study focuses on the number of journalists rather than the number of outlets, and found an 82 percent drop in the number of Local Journalist Equivalents since 2002. Looking at matched pairs of states with similar rural populations, those with more journalists per 100,000 residents also had lower loneliness rates. For example, Nevada and Massachusetts have nearly identical rural populations, around five to eight percent, but Nevada has roughly half the journalist density and the highest loneliness rate. Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 residents Percent of adults experiencing loneliness 6% rural Nevada 6.8 40.8% Massachusetts 14.4 33.3% 9% rural Utah 6.2 37.4% Rhode Island 12.9 34.2% 12% rural Connecticut 4.5 39.2% New York 10.3 35.4% 35% rural Kentucky 5 40.5% South Dakota 10.2 35.8% 43% rural Oklahoma 4.9 37.4% Wyoming 13.3 33.9% Why would this be? The mechanism may be the same as why we have more polarization: With less local news, people are more likely to turn to social media and their phones, which has, by itself, been shown to increase loneliness. But Hayes and Trivedi suggest two other possibilities. First, local news, when done well, provides information about events and places that draw people together. If you don’t know about the crafts fair or the community theater’s latest production of… [TheTopNews] Read More.
5 days ago
