Two wrecking balls hit public trust in local journalism

A slanted story about Biden's age gets blasted out to local TV audiences, and "pink slime" sites keep growing

Although I live in New York City, I wake to an email titled “Good Morning, Buffalo.” It’s a summary of stories from my hometown, put together by the staff of The Buffalo News, where I spent three decades, first as a reporter and, eventually, the top editor.

Do I trust that those stories are true and fair? I do — not just because I hired some of the reporters myself but because I know the region and its issues intimately, and would recognize something that’s out of whack. I also follow the work of a nonprofit news site in Buffalo, Investigative Post, and that of local radio and TV station.

In that way, I’m like a lot of other people. I have a pretty high level of trust in local news.

That trust is important. It gives people a shared reality, which these days is not so easy to come by.

An era when papers were starting new printing presses, not closing them down — George W. Bush and publisher Stan Lipsey start the presses for the Buffalo News in 2004 / Getty Images

That’s why these two media developments are so disturbing. After you read about them, I’ll offer some suggestions and some further reading.

If you know anything about Sinclair Broadcasting — which owns 200 local TV stations across the country — the latest about them might not surprise you. Judd Legum and Aaron Rupar report here on Substack that Sinclair picked up on a much-criticized Wall Street Journal story about Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness, and spread it through their local networks. The story in the Murdoch-controlled paper was headlined “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” but quoted only one person on the record: Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Despite interviewing lots of people who testify to the president’s competence, it quoted none of them. And McCarthy himself reportedly has said the opposite in more private settings.

Here’s what happened next:

“Sinclair repackaged the Wall Street Journal through its centralized news team … the story was then pushed to dozens of local news stations.”

Station anchors appeared to localize it, but then read from an identical script as they introduced it. As Rupar and Legum write: “Delivering right-wing attacks on Biden’s mental fitness under the guise of ‘local news’ is an extremely powerful tactic.” They note that 71 percent of Americans believe local news is accurate — that’s the trust factor I mentioned.

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Sinclair, which has leaned hard-right for years, has done this before. It’s a shameful misuse of the hard-won trust in local news and a sure-fire way to chip away at it.

Second, there’s a new report that fake local news outlets now outnumber real ones. The number of partisan-backed outlets — often funded with dark money and designed to look like legacy newspapers — has surpassed the number of real, local daily newspapers in the U.S. The report, from NewsGuard, did receive push back from some sites, and reasonably so since, for example, States Newsrooms (one of the outlets labeled as partisan) discloses its donors and does important reporting.

Sara Fischer of Axios wrote: “Many of those sites are targeted to swing states — a clear sign that they’re designed to influence politics.” My colleagues at Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center have done research on these so-called “pink slime” sites. (To explain the name: They look like the real thing — hamburger meat — but aren’t.)

Newspapers keep closing, at the rate of more than two every week, says a Northwestern University study, and pink slime proliferates.

Call to action: What can people who care about good journalism and democracy do to counter all of this?

You can pay for local news. Subscribe or contribute to a local paper or web site. In New York City, you might consider The City; in Baltimore, the Baltimore Banner; in Philadelphia, the Inquirer.

You can spread the word about these developments discussed above, and let friends and relatives and co-workers know that they’re happening.

And you can inform yourself more deeply about the problem by reading. You might coonsider my 2020 book “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” I’d also recommend Victor Pickard’s “Democracy Without Journalism?” You can also follow the excellent Steve Waldman, who founded Report for America, and check out his site RebuildLocalNews.org.

Thanks so much for subscribing and caring about these issues, especially as we are within five months of the extremely consequential presidential election. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments (if you are a paid subscriber) or on social media. How do you get your local news?

A postscript: Some of you have asked my view of the turmoil at the Washington Post, where I spent six years as the media columnist. Here’s my latest for The Guardian on that subject with some advice for owner Jeff Bezos.