Communities in Canada—particularly smaller communities—are starving for local news coverage.
Rural communities are particularly hard hit, as they rarely have alternative news sources to turn to if they lose what is often their only news media outlet.
When one first hears of the concept of a news desert—a region completely devoid of any local news media or journalism— the first reaction is that these must be places infested with misinformation, as people become entirely dependent on social media for their news sources.
The good news is that, while research is still emerging, this doesn’t seem to be the case, or at least persons within news deserts appear to be no more susceptible to misinformation than those who are served by local news media. This may have a lot to do with the fact that much of the news content available on the internet and social media often derives from traditional media sources.
This certainly does not mean that news deserts are benign—far from it. While the threat of misinformation may be overstated, the role of local news media in building community relations, fostering civic engagement and as a vital bulwark against local political corruption has been well established.
Too often, the idea of a news desert can leave us thinking in a simple binary—local news good, no local news bad. What I want to argue is that, even for those communities that do currently have their own local news media, the quality of that news media should be equally important.
The mere existence of local news media is not some guarantor of democracy. They also need to provide critical, investigative and original reportage of issues of concern to the community.
In western Canada, we have seen a host of rural news media consolidated under single companies. While these communities might have a putative newspaper (print or web-based) in name, in reality, the content is often highly standardized and reproduced across the chain.
The potential for original reportage and investigative journalism at these types of outlets are obviously limited. Moreover, because these outlets are often more concerned with generating profits than they are with providing original content, they can easily fall prey to ‘journalistic boosterism.’
This is where local news media operates more as a cheerleader for local business interests than as a critical chronicler of local issues.
Rural journalists have always walked a fine line in this regard, but it has only become more acute as these chain outlets chase profits rather than stories.
The concern is that rural news media— for fear of offending local advertisers or local sources of power or even the wider community—will avoid controversial issues, regardless of how important they may be.
In such a landscape, we can easily see the benefit of a public broadcaster, which, while not entirely immune to these pressures, would no doubt be more protected from their influence.
CBC’s Local Journalism Project is one initiative that could see rural journalists remain embedded within their communities, but not be as subject to some of the commercial and political pressures that for-profit media experiences.
This would be a return to the CBC’s original mission as a public broadcaster, to ensure that Canadians are receiving news and information that is not subject to the influence of powerful commercial interests.
If we truly value the contribution that journalism makes to democracy, it shouldn’t be enough that a community merely has access to local news media, but that it has access to high-quality, well-resourced, and independent news media.
