from the fake-plastic-everything dept

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “ news deserts ,” or local news that’s mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop.

Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” doing quality local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t. As a result, all sorts of terrible stuff has rushed to fill the vacuum where quality local journalism once existed.

That includes not just your usual collection of propaganda like Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc., but also so-called “pink slime” fake local newspapers that try to look like a real local paper, but are basically just partisan agitprop.

Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University did the definitive study on the…