The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy

ABSTRACT While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of local news has three major problems, all of which reinforce a false nostalgia for the role of local newspapers in communities and focus on saving local newspapers as they are rather than reimagining what local news could be. If scholars wish to fetishize the existence of a local news outlet in a community as essential to democratic life and civic connection, it might be helpful to think more critically about whether a local news outlet actually has content specific to that community. Similarly, declines are often unobservable in places that have already been limited in their local news provision because the starting point was already deeply problematic. The “news desert” deficit framing obscures historical news deserts, or areas that have long lacked access to professional, geographically specific news about their communities. We propose an approach that focuses on place-based specificity and argue that scholars may need to acknowledge that the availability of local news and information may play less of a role in overall political knowledge, social identity, and cultural cohesion in a hybridized, deeply polarized democracy.