Please support whatever local journalism you have in your area, if you have any. Financially if possible / subscriptions. They are one of the few organizations that give a voice in support of the public good, and very rarely receive the thanks and gratitude they deserve.
Many areas no longer have local journalism and are controlled by large corporations (most local TV news for example). In that case there is not much that can be done unless you are a journalist yourself.
The media is arguably a 4th branch of government that can help to maintain a system of checks and balances.
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I subscribe to the local paper but they are not great and I feel conflicted about it. The reality is they are just a stripped down edition of USA Today, their actual local coverage is dominated by school sports, they publish a lot of dumb opinions, and there’s always so many ads.
Yeah I guess that’s not really very good journalism. If they have nothing “hard hitting” or for investigative journalism, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not owned by a larger corporation.
I think a lot of the better organizations are very small, and sometimes go by hyper or micro local news. They’re less about covering everything, and more about going deeper into a few important topics of importance to people who live there.
I subscribe to one where I live and the things they cover are unbelievable compared to the corporate newspapers and tv news. Things that really have a huge effect on me and everyone else personally.
Is this the best answer? (Genuine question, I appreciate the sentiment and agree with it, but does it really address the issues with news outlets?).
I just don’t know what the answer is, given that news has been horribly biased and corrupt since the very beginning of Hearst news (I recall reading how stories were biased toward mining interests early on), and wiki quotes this:
Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Nazis received positive press coverage by Hearst presses and paid ten times the standard subscription rate for the INS wire service belonging to Hearst.[23] William Randolph Hearst personally instructed his reporters in Germany to only give positive coverage to Hitler and the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favourable of German fascism.[23]
(I’ve read sources other than Wiki’s footnotes on this claim, so consider it valid)