The other day I was listening to my usual U.S politics podcast. Specifically, I was listening to an interesting episode about the decline of local news. The phenomenon was familiar to me, I had heard and read about it before: noble small-town papers and TV stations submerge beneath the rising tide of malevolent national media conglomerates.
But the podcast introduced a new perspective on this familiar story, one that went beyond David and Goliath cliches. It made me wonder about what we miss when we only consume national and global stories. It made me ask myself: what does it mean to only read the New York Times, or other newspapers like it?
Before I go further, I want to unpack the problem of declining local news a little more.
The decline of local news is a story that all Americans are at least vaguely familiar with. Small-town, state-based papers and news channels have been on the decline for years now, flagging and sometimes shutting down in the rising tide of big, national media conglomerates.
Mostly everyone consumes their media and news from the same shortlist of sources - be it FOX, the Washington Post, Vox, The New Yorker, etc. - as well as an array of social media. Only partisanship and aesthetic preference lead to some variations here and there.
What does this mean though? Why does it actually matter if Americans go from a microcosm of local papers to a shortlist of big ones?
Answering this question exhaustively would take pages upon pages. But it boils down, I think, to three main categories of problems.
One, polarization. With less sources and more uniformity across the information system, dualities become sharpened. One side clusters around one paper, and the other to another. Extend this phenomenon across a nation using the same papers, and the two sides will begin to understand their positions in broader conflictual terms. It is easier to become outraged when there are less objects at which you can direct your outrage, when you think you can identify the source of your opponents' misconceptions.
Two, doom and gloom thinking. Everyone knows that media has a tendency to emphasize terrible and shocking stories - shark attacks and car accidents - because people tend to be more interested in those kinds of stories. Local news isn't immune to this kind of prioritization, but it does limit how many of these stories can plausibly occur during any given week. If you run a global or national paper with a correspondingly larger outlook, it can be far too easy (and far too enticing) to collect a menagerie of disasters to fill your column inches or runtime. So if all Americans only consume national media, there is a fair chance they will lose sight of what progress is being made, and that they will descend into their party's version of apocalyptical thinking.
Three, out of touch with on-the-ground realities. Finally, national stories have an inherent tendency to explain events in broad, birds-eye terms. This can be extremely useful for understanding the full sweep and relevance of said event. It can also clarify important connections between different events. But it often misrepresents the personal realities of the people living through or around the event. Someone in New York might think they understand the rise of anti-vax sentiment in Louisiana, because they read an opinion piece on the matter, but it is likely that they have missed a crucial part of the puzzle. When we only consume national news, we often deepen misconceptions about how other people in the country (or even other people in our own towns) live.
With all that said, we can return to the question; is there such a thing as too much New York Times? This somewhat awkward question is asked deliberately, because I direct it to myself - living overseas, I get by on an exclusively national-media diet, especially the International New York Times. So, in response to the podcast bringing up all the associated limits and shortcomings of national media, this was the question that immediately and obviously came to mind.
And I think the answer is yes.
It's not that the New York Times is deeply biased or an output of misinformation. Indeed, I think it is particularly devoid of bias or misinformation, especially when compared to other major American news sources.
But there is only so much you can fit into a paper that long. And while you come across stories big and small, focused and rambling, each is set into the context of wider movements and broader themes. Realistically, there are too many great and terrible things happening on the world stage for things to be any different.
From my vantage point across an ocean, reliant as I am on an international newspaper that publishes out of New York and Paris, I feel the acute need of local stories more than most. That's why the podcast got to me, why I felt a need to write about it. Because it illuminated something I haven't really had.
There are the usual prescriptions on how to get said local stories: support your local paper, try to diversify your media diet, and engage in your community. Those are all valid and true. But when all else fails, when there is no real local paper to buy and your community is constantly being picked up and moved around, I think it becomes a question of paying attention.
Paying attention to small and insignificant rhythms, despite all the other credits on your attention, can weave you into a place more than most anything. Notice what changes and what stays, what tragedies and triumphs surround. After all, appreciating the local and moving away from the national and global takes a change of scale, a zoom in.
For the local news universe to return to America, much will have to change. It is hard to envision how this change will come or what will drive it onwards. But if the nationalization of civil life will ever slow down, it will be because Americans have rediscovered the insignificant. It will be because the measures and motions of the world's spin no longer agitate and terrify. It will be because of small things.
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