NY1's Errol Louis highlights the necessity of a “robust, competitive news environment in which we can hold the powerful accountable”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the November 5 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources:
BRIAN STELTER (HOST): On Monday, laid off reporters from the beloved local news sites DNAInfo and Gothamist are set to rally here in New York in support of independent journalism. Just a few days after the owner of the sites Joe Ricketts abruptly decided to shut down the sites. One hundred fifteen people are now without jobs in New York, D.C., Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco. It's a particularly painful example of an ongoing, worsening problem: cutbacks to local news coverage, both in big cities and in small towns all across America.
[...]
Errol, you talked about this on your network, New York One, over the weekend. Your message being that viewers, readers, have to take a responsibility here, have a stake in keeping newsrooms alive.
ERROL LOUIS: That's right. When your local public radio or television station is asking you for a donation, it's not a joke. It's not for the tote bag, you know? It's to really ensure that we've got something what we call an ecosystem, or some version of a robust, competitive news environment in which we can hold the powerful accountable. It is tremendously important. And it's very easy to miss the point that just because your daily newspaper continues to come out, it's thinner, it's smaller, there's fewer reporters. They're not able to provide the kind of coverage that we did in the past. And as long as that continues, the people in power are going to get away with murder. The corporate leaders, the political leaders especially. Corruption goes unchecked or unnoticed. There are a lot of really bad consequences, and it's almost imperceptible, so --
STELTER: Right, it's the stories that aren't told that you don't know about.
LOUIS: Exactly right. And frankly, it's the outrages that are not attempted. Because they know there's going to be somebody there at the county commission recording what they say and comparing it to what they promised last year.
STELTER: Interesting.
LOUIS: As long as that sense of impunity is there, we're going to have huge, huge problems. And it's not going away. This is a problem that people have tried to wish away.
[...]
So there's an ugly, union-busting twist to this that deals with whether or not we want journalists, who are providing vital information about important topics, to be paid a fair and living wage. So you have that little sort of twist on the underlying problem. But the reality is, none of this would be as fraught of an issue if we can figure out a way to sort of make local news viable as a business model.
Previously:
How National Media Failed Flint
Five great examples of local journalism showing what the GOP bill will do to Americans