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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Why would you trust your local newspaper?

I’m being a little facetious—you potentially have access to its journalists in a way you wouldn’t for national concerns. But what does that really buy you? How much time and effort do you spend on keeping the locals in check? You’re not going to rally your town to ostracize the editor, not without a truly spectacular bias.

There are fewer people pulling on the local news, which is not the same as less total pull. It’s a lot cheaper to buy glowing reviews or softball coverage from a local outlet than from the New York Times. The result is that local journalists and editors may not be biased by Big Pharma or a wannabe President, but by a local employer, a motivated city councilman, or that bitch Annette, I can’t believe she took the kids, you can’t trust her.

Scrutiny by opposing interests is higher for large outlets, too. I remember thinking it was odd for commenters to grill Miami’s local news the other week. How many people do they really reach? Anything smaller will be even less visible.

I think it’s awfully hard to start from an adversarial basis, from game theory or realpolitik, and come up with reasons to trust. The difference in local and national news is that you might give locals the benefit of the doubt.

Agreed entirely. The only reason I excluded local newspapers from my sweeping declaration is because in most places I have lived you can actually hold them accountable for dishonesty, although it's often a bit like pulling teeth. But they are usually small enough to respect reader complaints, and a lot of them are where the autistically truth-seeking oldheads ended up after society decided we were too smart to bother with the truth, because local beats are like punishment to clout chasers.

I think the two tools in a low trust environment we can use to build trust are objectivity and accountability. We can't perfect either and to err is human, but anyone who puts a sincere effort into trying to be objective and holding themselves accountable for their mistakes deserves tentative trust I reckon.