Editor’s note: This column is from a speech Stanley gave at a Sept. 17 Constitution Day event organized by Viterbo University in La Crosse and LeaderEthics, a group dedicated to encouraging integrity among elected representatives.
Recently we’ve seen Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota and a young Republican influencer targeted for assassination; troops corralling protesters on American streets; a U.S. senator handcuffed and hauled away from a public event; news outlets being threatened and sued; lies, propaganda and doctored videos raging across social networks.
Across our state and nation, more and more of the information people receive is bitter and dividing. New technologies have changed how people shop, advertise and search for information. Mobile feeds are driven by algorithms that grab attention by fueling passions, especially anger and lust. These same changes have undermined the business model that long financed local news outlets — the sources that inform communities, connect neighbors and nurture civic life.
This all contributes to the fracturing of our communities, to folks not getting the information they need to navigate everyday challenges and to declining trust that our democracy still works at finding solutions.
You can see it in annual Gallup polls measuring trust in our institutions. Since the late 1970s, folks who say they trust the news media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” have dropped from 72% to 31%. Likewise, trust in the medical system has plunged from 74% to 36%, in church and organized religion from 64% to 32%, in public schools from 53% to 29%, in banks from 60% to 27%, in Congress from 40% to 9%.
More and more of us feel overwhelmed by dramatic headlines from social networks, text feeds, national outlets and national chains posing as local news channels. Yet we’re seeing less and less about what’s happening in our neighborhoods, cities and counties.
We’re seeing plenty about the worst things happening in the world at the moment.
But in many local communities, we’re not seeing nearly enough fair, honest reporting about what’s happening where we live, where most of our tax dollars are spent and where decisions that shape our everyday lives are made: in school board meetings, in city halls, in statehouses, in gatherings of people of good will trying to make things better.
At the core of all this lies a market disruption in a society that relies on the marketplace to fill its needs — until it can’t. The local commerce advertising model that long supported local news has been overturned.
And the consequences are alarming. When communities lose their local news, civic engagement drops, corruption goes unchecked, government waste increases, polarization deepens, people begin to lose faith in democracy and its institutions.
Our democratic republic, more than other forms of government, relies on trust and truth.
The founders of our republic overcame an entitled king and the world’s strongest military. They knew that tyrants grasp and retain power by controlling the stories told to the people they rule. They understood how critical a well-informed citizenry would be to the success of self-government.
They gave us the First Amendment to the Constitution so that citizens without political power would be free to tell one another what was really going on.
They worried, in those early years, how people in small towns and rural areas — outside of Boston, Philadelphia and New York — would receive enough news and information to make sound decisions and keep control over their government. So the first Postal Act, signed into law by President George Washington, provided free delivery of newspapers — a government subsidy of local news as a public service.
This helped sow the seeds of a local news industry that would expand to serve a growing population of people arriving from across the globe in search of liberty. Local commerce did the rest — from people selling to their neighbors through classified ads, to retailers advertising their wares to everyone within driving distance of their stores. This business model supported news reporters who covered floods and fires, zoning and planning commissions, school boards, village councils, county boards, state agencies, elections and community events — from our smallest towns to our biggest cities — until the 21st century.
The collapse of that business model happened so quickly that we haven’t had time to adjust or even to understand what it means.
In 1999, I was managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when its sales and profits hit heights they would never see again. Classified ads of neighbors selling to neighbors filled multiple print sections. The three largest retail advertisers were Boston Store, American TV and Circuit City.
Craigslist was a startup in the San Francisco Bay area offering free online ads for folks selling cars, boats, jobs and services. They supported their small staff with revenue from display advertising appearing next to the free classifieds.
Amazon sold one product: printed books, with ink on paper.
Over the next decade, Craigslist and imitators spread like windswept wildfires to every city and then town, sucking the classified ads out of every local newspaper in America.
On the retail side, Circuit City closed in the Great Recession.
When American TV shut down a few years later, its family owner said their stores had “become showrooms for Amazon.” Folks would come in, see a product they liked, google their cellphones to find it on sale at a lower price elsewhere in the world, and order it right then and there to be delivered to their homes.
Boston Store, a fixture in Milwaukee since the 1890s, strived to stay alive by buying other department store chains to find economies of scale but succumbed in 2018.
By that time, the Journal Sentinel, which traced its roots to before Milwaukee was a city and before Wisconsin was a state, had been sold first to a national media chain based in Cincinnati, then spun off to a newspaper chain based in Washington, D.C., which itself was swallowed by a hedge-fund-controlled chain rising from the depths of bankruptcy.
The same thing was happening to local advertisers and local newsrooms almost everywhere. Green Bay, for example, was home to Prange’s and Shopko. Gone.
Every major daily newspaper in Wisconsin is now owned by a distant cost-cutting chain, as are most commercial broadcast outlets and many community weeklies.
We’ve lost more than six out of 10 journalists in Wisconsin and nationwide, but it’s worse than that. Because most of the journalists left are clustered in our biggest cities. There, many continue to do outstanding work despite shrinking budgets, often with the help of grants, fellowships and partnerships. But as parent corporations seek to maximize digital audiences and subscriptions, they devote a lion’s share of resources toward the same attention-grabbing national stories, highlighting the most tragic events and most polarizing political conflicts, while spewing nonstop coverage of celebrities, sports stars and social network gossip.
An average of two local newspapers in America have been closing each week for the past 20 years. About half our nation’s counties have only one news outlet left, and hundreds have none. The smaller and less wealthy the community, the bigger the losses.
“Ghost” newspapers are proliferating, featuring legacy mastheads with stories from elsewhere because no local journalists remain in town.
At the same time, Wisconsin has become one of just seven swing election states that determine which party and their backers win control over branches of the federal government. As a result we attract huge volumes of attack ads and misleading propaganda from those seeking national power and influence. Political websites disguised as nonpartisan news outlets have proliferated. Our state and local elections and public discussions increasingly reflect the bitter “us against them” dysfunction we see at the national level.
Take, for example, the circus of a “nonpartisan” state Supreme Court race we witnessed this past spring. Misleading attack ads dominated TV and radio; campaign text alerts buzzed over our phones; faraway billionaires with personal agendas spent tens of millions to elect one judge in a place they might have flown over; the world’s richest man, born and raised in South Africa and now residing in Texas, donned a Cheesehead while passing out million-dollar checks to Wisconsin voters.
As The Constitution was being ratified in 1787, Ben Franklin was asked: “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” he famously responded. “IF you can keep it.”
To keep our republic, we must revive our local news ecosystem.
Given the huge loss of reporters covering local government and community life, we need to begin by nurturing collaborative efforts, where newsrooms work together to tell the local and state stories that matter most. As a Wisconsin-based nonprofit with a mission of providing impactful reporting — and sharing it freely — Wisconsin Watch is the news outlet in the best position to support this revival across our state.
We’ll need help from all who can provide it.
Here’s a quick sampling of what we hope to do with support from members, donors and everyone who cares about rejuvenating democracy and civic life in Wisconsin:
- We’re investing in a statehouse bureau that is providing evidence-based reporting and fact-checking to more than 200 news outlets across the state. We’re not duplicating what others are doing but providing key accountability and campaign stories that otherwise wouldn’t be reported.
- We’re building our in-depth investigative team to offer our services to all newsrooms in the state that no longer have the resources to dig deep. If a local news outlet or citizen suspects incompetence, wrongdoing, misspending of taxpayer dollars, abuse of power, bring it to Wisconsin Watch. In addition to shining a light on the problem, we are searching for examples of places doing a better job tackling similar challenges.
- We’re serving accurate, fact-based state and local news to folks wherever they get their information. That includes sharing video summaries of key news stories on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. It includes video and audio fact checks shared freely with commercial and public radio stations reaching rural areas with low broadband usage.
- We’re adding local journalists to fill news deserts. In Milwaukee, we’ve merged with Neighborhood News Service. In northeast Wisconsin, we’re collaborating with commercial and nonprofit newsrooms and the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation. We’re listening to learn folks’ most pressing local news needs, then we’ll find ways to fill them — and get that information to the people who need it most, through the channels they’re using.
- We’re raising money to fill key reporting gaps. This will include training citizen observers to objectively take notes and ask questions at public meetings and hearings where there aren’t enough journalists to cover the ground. It will include reporting beats focused on public service — major challenges people are facing; solutions folks are bringing to the table; key issues such as the challenge of today’s housing market; affordable child and senior care; the skills and education needed for family-supporting jobs and how to get them.
- We’re aspiring to replicate our regional news bureaus across the state as the impact of this work proves its value.
Alexis de Tocqueville came to America from France 200 years ago to explain to his peers in Europe how this new experiment in democracy was working. He saw firsthand how messy things can get — how hard it can be to build consensus with so many points of view and competing interests in play.
So when a European gentleman asked him how America had become so enlightened, Tocqueville shook his head. He said: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”
How do we repair those faults? I’ve seen long-standing and seemingly insurmountable challenges overcome when three things are present:
- Enough people see and understand the problem to get the attention of responsible parties.
- Enough people care about the problem to demand better.
- People can see a road map to success — examples where folks have tackled similar problems more effectively, with evidence to back it up.
When these three things are present, political partisanship tends to dissipate and people of goodwill come together to build better ways.
When all three elements are absent, the inertia of doing things the way they’ve always been done remains in charge.
So no matter what problem you aim to address in our democracy, you’ll need honest reporters to inform the public, to show how the problem is affecting real people and to highlight better ways. Otherwise, you’re likely to grow frustrated you’ve spent so much time, money and energy while things never seem to get better.
As Alberto Ibargüen, longtime head of the Knight Foundation, puts it: “Whatever your first priority, journalism needs to be your second” priority if you want to make a difference and make improvements in our democratic republic.
It’s time to support public service journalism in the same way we support our libraries, the arts and other civic treasures essential to quality of life. Let’s nurture community and ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people does not perish from the earth.
Sarabeth Berman, head of the American Journalism Project, one of our supporters, puts it this way:
“This is not the story of a dying industry. It is the story of a country choosing to rebuild its civic life — one newsroom, one community at a time.”
I love her emphasis on the key elements of choice and action, which many folks don’t think about until it’s pointed out in a powerful way.
We are a democracy. The government, at all levels, works for us when we do our part. We can act to change things. We don’t have to be resigned and accept the way things are as inevitable. We’re in charge — if we choose to be.
America struggled through similar challenges more than a century ago when the industrial revolution dramatically shifted massive wealth into the hands of a few. The two political parties, and the wealthy and powerful forces supporting them, fostered polarization, disinformation and benefited from “us against them” tactics. The highly partisan “yellow press” of the Gilded Age behaved much like the angry partisans in our feeds today.
But then responsible grown-ups of goodwill took back control — one community, one state at a time. Along with Theodore Roosevelt at the national level, our state was a leader in this movement, with people like Fighting Bob La Follette, Charles Van Hise, Daniel Hoan and Charles McCarthy. The fruits of their efforts include The Wisconsin Idea and one of the nation’s first journalism schools in Madison — to teach and spread nonpartisan, fact-based, honest reporting that informs the good people of Wisconsin.
It is time for us all to do our part again. We welcome your contributions and support.
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