Fears that ‘pink slime’ sites could be as harmful to political discourse as foreign disinformation in 2016 and 2020
Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election.
Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”
Local news is often the highest quality. The incentives are too different and the stakes are lower. Of course this means local news reporting on local stories. National stories are, as you mentioned, likely written based on a press release authored by who knows.
no more local news just articles about the latest restaurant in the more gentrified area and about how great it is to live here plus lots of sports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McClatchy
I think that we will just have to disagree on this one.
I deal with local news quite a bit (and occasionally national news) in my real life. It is one of the last places made up of actual people going out, doing interviews, asking questions, reporting on the facts that they find, and held accountable to the people of the community. I’ve had the same experience with TV and print news.
When national reporters show up, they generally already know the story they are going to tell and are looking for pics and quotes to confirm their version of a story.
There are national journalists and even (a few) independent journalists who are also doing honest, important investigative work, but I personally have not dealt with them.
Both you and the other commenter are right: local news often features better journalism than national news outlets, however the US is currently undergoing a mass extinction of local news organizations. “News deserts” are quickly becoming a thing.
https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2023/more-than-half-of-us-counties-have-no-access-or-very-limited-access-to-local-news.html
Also true. It’s not easy to support local news but it’s very important. I haven’t really seen a good model of how to do that.
They provide a public good, so maybe they should be publicly funded? It works okay for the national broadcast news systems that exist in a lot of cases (PBS, NPR, BBC).