The news today is that there has been a severe drop in the coverage of local government by local newspapers.
The NY Times reports, in an article, A Federal Study Finds That Local Reporting Has Waned
Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged, concluded the study, which is to be released on Thursday.
"In many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting," said the study, which was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission and written by Steven Waldman, a former journalist for Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. "The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism -- going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy -- is in some cases at risk at the local level."
That's bad news for democracy. Accountability depends upon the sunlight that the media cast upon the workings of government.
Newspapers are shutting down or cutting local coverage reporting (image from flickr by banlon1964)
Opednews has long been designed to support local coverage of local news. We have a tag for every state and county and major city in the US and you can easily add one for your town, even your neighborhood. We have tags for the Canadian and Australian Provinces and we're happy to add tags for local towns or provinces anywhere in the world.
My point is that for years, Opednews.com has been built to support local news and coverage. We invite you to tap the power of the site to cast light on your local stories. There's no cost and you never know what reporting on a story thought to be growing like a mushroom in the dark can do to corruption or malfeasance.
Opednews is not like other sites that just take big articles by big writers. We take articles from the bottom up, because we believe that there is value in the perspective of everyone and anyone. Yes, we do curate our content, but it is extraordinarily open.
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