mueller24_Yegor AleyevTASS via Getty Images_newspaperrussiavillagerural

Culture

Où sont les nouvelles locales sur le COVID-19 ?

Apr 29, 2020 Jan-Werner Mueller

PRINCETON – Lors d'une pandémie, l'exactitude des informations peut être une question de vie ou de mort. Les gens ont besoin de reportages fiables sur l'impact de la maladie et sur la menace qu'elle représente pour leur ville, leur communauté ou leur quartier. Savoir si leur pays est sur la bonne macro-trajectoire n'est pas la préoccupation première de la plupart des citoyens. Ils se soucient plutôt de la qualité des pratiques d'hygiène de leur épicerie locale et de ses efforts pour mettre en œuvre des mesures de distanciation sociale.

L'une des nombreuses tragédies de la pandémie de COVID-19 est qu'elle survient à un moment où les médias locaux sont décimés dans de nombreux pays, et où certains dirigeants enclins à l'autoritarisme, comme le président américain Donald Trump, le Premier ministre hongrois Viktor Orbán et le Premier ministre indien Narendra Modi, mènent une guerre ouverte contre le journalisme indépendant. Lors d'une récente conférence de presse quotidienne, Trump a accusé un journaliste de diffuser des « fausses nouvelles », puis a suggéré que l'injection de désinfectants ménagers pourrait être efficace contre le coronavirus.

Le nœud du problème, c'est que la presse locale, en particulier, a été gravement perturbée par une restructuration plus large de l'économie au cours des deux dernières décennies. Historiquement, la publicité a soutenu un journalisme sérieux. Comme l'a souligné Clay Shirky de NYU dans un commentaire de 2009, peu importe si Wal-Mart a eu ou non un intérêt pour les nouvelles en provenance d'Irak, mais il a néanmoins subventionné les rédactions de presse de Bagdad.

To continue reading, register now.

Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything PS has to offer.

As a registered user, you can enjoy more PS content every month – for free.

Already have an account? Log in

Subscribe to PS Digital

Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.

Subscribe Now

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 2 Comments on this article

j. von Hettlingen Apr 30, 2020

Jan-Werner Mueller says the “many tragedies” of the current pandemic could have been mitigated had local media not been “decimated” in many countries. In times of a national health emergency, “accurate information can be a matter of life and death. People need reliable reports about the impact of the disease and the threat it poses to their city, community, or neighborhood.” Their immediate concern is less about “whether their country is on the right macro-trajectory, but whether their local grocery store is practicing proper hygiene and enforcing social-distancing measures.”
The decline of local journalism has left “five million Americans with no local newspaper at all, and 60 million more with access to only one.” According to a recent Brookings Institution report, “one in five local US newspapers has disappeared since 2004.” This fuels the rise of low-quality “clickbait” news based on commercial incentives. Since Trump lashes out at respectable mainstream media and calls them “fake news,” authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, India’s Narendra Modi have been
“waging all-out war on independent journalism.”
According to the author, “digital platforms” like Google and Facebook are to blame for the decline in print journalism, “hoovering up the advertising revenues that previously went directly to news organizations, local outlets were the first to feel the pinch. Newsroom staff was cut dramatically.”
On a national level this decline has been partly compensated by a shift from print to digital, and a blizzard of information from other media. But locally, it is damaging to the community.
A local newspaper reflects the place in which its readers live, and shapes shared feelings of hope and of anger and helps to piece together the story of where they are. It also holds powerful local figures to account. The author says, “when there are no journalists to report on town council meetings and public procurement decisions, corruption can run rampant. But partly because no one hears about it, political interest also declines.”
When local people become less engaged in their community, distrust in public institutions increases. Often a “democracy deficit” can be linked to the closure of local newspapers, with “lower electoral turnout, fewer candidates seeking office, and more incumbents winning.” When people lose a communal voice, they feel angry, not listened to, and more likely to believe malicious rumour and misinformation.
“The same trends undercut citizens’ representation at the national level, because local and regional papers cannot afford to keep a correspondent in the capital to report on what their members of Congress or Parliament are doing,” according to the author.
While local newspapers in the US face an existential threat, the major national press saw a spike in donations and subscriptions since Trump’s election in 2016. People realised the importance of trustworthy news to make sense of what is going on. “And while the COVID-19 crisis could, in theory, make citizens recognize the existential importance of receiving accurate information about their immediate surroundings, a local-news bump has yet to materialize.”
The author proposes a solution to revive local journalism – taxing the Big Tech companies, and redistributing the funds to local news outlets. “Another option is to legislate an antitrust exception so that newspapers can bargain collectively with digital platforms. The media outlets providing the actual facts and information that show up in a Google search should be compensated accordingly. Australia, the European Union, and several individual European countries have already moved in this direction, and similar legislation is pending in the US.”
Ironically, Facebook and Google, had promised to breathe new life into local newspapers. They said they have each launched ambitious $100m-a-year schemes (covering Britain and the US) to find ways to rebuild the local news economies that between them they have effectively destroyed. The author says “there has also been a blossoming of successful non-profit news organizations in recent years, many of which have a local focus. But the risk now is that such institutions could become dependent on some billionaire philanthropist, leaving them beholden to one person’s arbitrary will.”
This prompts critics to fear that we may one day lose a free and independent press. “The problem with many right-wing outlets today is not necessarily that they have an agenda, but that the agenda is hidden, with mere opinion being presented as professionally generated news. A particularly egregious example is Fox “News,” which earlier this spring eagerly spread dangerous disinformation about the coronavirus, probably costing the lives of some of its predominantly elderly audience.”
The author says, the “French social scientist Julia Cagé has proposed an ingenious solution: ordinary supporters of accurate reporting could pool their resources to secure controlling shares of the most effective media nonprofits.”
Indeed, good quality journalism constitutes a huge force to defend our vibrant civil society, and a benefit for the common good. We need to be properly informed so that we can make our own decisions and move forward as a country.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
michael schmitt Apr 29, 2020

this could've been a good article about an important issue. rather, the author subverts his own message in (at least) two glaringly biased statements: (a) "tax the Big Tech companies... then redistribute the funds to local outlets"...I'm pretty sure the last thing we need is for government to pick and choose which news outlets get the benefits of such a policy, and (b) "The problem with many right-wing outlets today is ... that the agenda is hidden" ...whining about the so-called agenda of right wing news outlets without admitting that the lefties suffer from the same oft-hidden sort of bias is disingenuous at best.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.

https://prosyn.org/6P0Fvbcfr

Où sont les nouvelles locales sur le COVID-19 ?

Subscribe to PS Digital

New Comment

Contact us

Log in/Register

Où sont les nouvelles locales sur le COVID-19 ?

Subscribe to PS Digital

Edit Newsletter Preferences

Set up Notification