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Culture

¿Dónde se encuentran noticias locales sobre el COVID-19?

Apr 29, 2020 Jan-Werner Mueller

PRINCETON – Durante una pandemia, la información precisa puede ser una cuestión de vida o muerte. Las personas necesitan información fidedigna sobre el impacto de la enfermedad y la amenaza que representa para su ciudad, comunidad o vecindario. La preocupación apremiante de la mayoría de los ciudadanos no es si su país está en la macro-trayectoria correcta con respecto al virus, sino si su tienda local de comestibles está practicando una higiene adecuada y aplicando medidas de distanciamiento social.

Una de las muchas tragedias de la pandemia COVID-19 es que se produce en una época en la que en muchos países los medios de comunicación locales han sido diezmados, y en un momento en el que líderes autoritarios, como por ejemplo el presidente de Estados Unidos Donald Trump, el primer ministro húngaro Viktor Orbán y el primer ministro de la India Narendra Modi han estado librando una guerra sin cuartel contra el periodismo independiente. En una reciente conferencia de prensa diaria, Trump acusó a un reportero de dar “noticias falsas”, y luego sugerió que inyectar desinfectantes domésticos podría ser eficaz contra el coronavirus.

El meollo del problema es que las noticias locales, en especial, se han visto gravemente perturbadas por una reestructuración más amplia de la economía a lo largo de las dos últimas décadas. Históricamente, la publicidad fue la que sustentaba al periodismo serio. Como señaló Clay Shirky de la Universidad de Nueva York en una crónica publicada en el año 2009, independientemente de que a Wal-Mart le hubiese interesado o no las noticias provenientes de Irak, de todas formas esta cadena subvencionó las salas de prensa que los periódicos mantenían en Bagdad.

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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.
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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.
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