I read recently that newspaper companies that together account for half the circulation in this country are owned by hedge funds.
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Six companies own something like 90 percent of all US media. Now ask yourself - who owns those six companies?
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Elizabeth Warren: hear this?
I think local reporting can be revived. Like anything, it just has to be made interesting, compelling, useful, good, and give people something to participate in and connect to others with.
What form that will take, I don’t know, but I can guess that it might be internet-based. But first we need to repair the internet, the First Amendment, Capitalism, Democracy, and the planet Earth.
But look at it this way: it would be a hell of a fun and worthwhile project, and we might just be able to squeeze a few more high-quality centuries out of our existence as the United States of America.
Some micro trends regarding non-political and non-conspiratorial hesitancy obviously are at play, but the larger trend still holds.
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Yes, I have previously noted the understandable historical grounds for hesitancy in Black communities (also singling out Tuskegee by way of example). I still remain hopeful that many of these folks will come around in the coming weeks when the protection offered by the vaccines becomes obviated by declining case counts amongst areas with high vaccination rates.
I always try and remind myself that many red states are red as much due to voter suppression as explicit voter preferences.
There’s a pretty entrenched local political elite in rural Alabama and Mississippi that is quite happy with their state being “the worst in every good thing and the best in everything that’s bad” - as long as they are on the top of the local heap.
So whether black and Hispanic folks are explicitly disfranchised or just so ground down by a century and a half of post- reconstruction economic suppression that they don’t bother to try and vote, I think those of us in “blue states” need to try and help them even though they live in communities whose local power structure doesn’t want the help.
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Amid declining readership, many chains 20 or 30 years ago started making their newspapers more “fun,” with colorful graphics, shorter stories, more lifestyle fluff, yadda yadda. And it hasn’t worked.
And it’s even worse today, with so many cities without even a single reporter covering City Hall, let alone the state capital.
I guess people would rather stare at their phone.
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Well, fun and “fun,” as in “dumbed down and catering to our narcissism,” are two different things. I’m not proposing another USA Today, but something more along the lines of what our libraries and The Hive have to offer. Not one-size-fits-all, but whatever works for each locality.
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I’d like to see it, but maybe newspapers, besides flagship names like the Post and NYT, have had their day.
Which is said because their function is more needed than ever.
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Even more granular than that. We need to move away from concentrating everything in New York and Washington D.C.
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As the article notes, the correlation to partisanship sits at 0.85 (and still rising). Voter suppression isn’t messing all that much, more likely the micro trends of hesitancy in Black communities and economically marginalized people fearing side affects threatening the income or even their jobs.
Looking at the trends in red states, it seem reasonable to surmise that the early vaccinators were mostly blue voters. As their population dried up, daily dose rates plummeted.
There are blue enclaves in even the red-est of states. These communities will fair much better in any future outbreak because they have been vaccinated. Unfortunately, it seems that the only thing that might smarten up some people will be another outbreak where mostly Republicans are the only ones sick and dying.
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There needs to be a business model that supports it. Right now, many communities aren’t supporting them. And most new advertising revenue is going to Facebook and Google.
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Looks up from reading TPM on his phone, shrugs, goes back to reading TPM on his phone…
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If the bandwidth is there, people will come. All it takes is a person to start doing something interesting, on their own dime. It could be local news of the local cat. Word spreads, people want to contribute their own stuff, a tip jar is set up, the thing grows between the cracks without any directed effort, it gets pruned back, stakes and string are supplied to train the plants, … I tell you it’s a digital pea patch kind of a thing. Maybe you could get an actual pea out of it.
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We could use something like that.
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Most recently shown, and in the baldest possible terms, with the T**** administration and its cabinet appointees.
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This is idiotic. To start, only five GOP are on board, at least they say they are but they lie like water in pouring rain, anyway, name me five more. Never mind, I can’t wait until the next century or so for that to happen. Second, there’s no way to get enough, if any, Democratic Senators to go along with this bird brained insincere proposal. Third, the House wouldn’t go for it even if the American House of Lords managed to somehow pass something, and the odds of that happening are at least 1000-1.
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I’m the of the opposite view. Most voters don’t know a filibuster from a ham sandwich. If Democrats fail to go big and bold and then say its because the GOP won’t allow it, they’ll lose Congress in 2022. Failure to deliver on taxes, the Mueller Report, and other numerous crimes and blaming the GOP almost lost Democrats the Congress in 2020.
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You don’t speak of filibuster, you speak of Republican obstructionism. You speak of needing more reasonable voices in the senate (meaning more democrats).
The Dems have the advantage in senate contests in 2022 of AZ, GA, NC, PA and WI, Warnock in GA is “at risk” but Kelly remains quite popular in AZ while PA, NC and WI open contests deny the Republicans an incumbency advantage where Dems have been edging ahead in state wide contests.
The House is hard to handicap before redistricting, but outside of a few states that just might try to radically redraw their maps, the census reapportionment was not as favourable to Republican ambitions as they’d hoped.
Another problem for Republicans is that they cannot rely on their old formulas for gerrymandering. The dramatic shift of suburban votes to blue in 2020 has shaken the standard city toe-hold-through-some-suburbs-into-a-vast-rural-landscape; for the city-toe-hold-and-suburbs just might yield too many blue votes.
As for the issues, it’s hard to tell what will be most pressing to swing voters by next summer, but my impression is that the nation will be both relieved and thankful that the pandemic is behind them and will be looking towards a brighter future. That will be to the Dems advantage.
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Thanks for the link : - )
From its founding, the United States has cultivated a national mythos around the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ostensibly by their own merits… It explains why the U.S. focused so intensely on preserving its hospital capacity instead of on measures that would have saved people from even needing a hospital.
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