I am honored to have a dear friend of many years who earned his living as a broadcast journalist. I won’t mention his name here, as he is long retired, but we are still close friends. He was an anchorman for major New York City TV stations, as well as working for a major network for many years. I have stayed at his home and admired his collection of journalism awards. My usual joke is that between us, we average 6 Emmys each (he has 12).

I was thinking about my friend when I read an interesting article about local journalism in the internet age. As a nation, and in Colorado in particular, we are losing local news coverage at a rate that should disturb consumers of news and information. The Rocky Mountain News is gone, and the Denver Post’s newsroom is staffed at a much lower level than in recent years. Other Colorado cities have found their local papers getting, well, thinner in size and content.

I visited my friend the Emmy winner many years ago in his office in NYC. It was an eye-opening visit. His computer terminal dinged every time a new news story was reported by the various news services. I used to ask my students at the Air Force Academy how often they guess my friend’s computer dinged, and they usually guessed every few minutes. In truth, a new story popped up every two seconds or so. There was then, and likely remains today, a flood of news pouring out all day and all night. Back in my youth, respected journalists like Walter Cronkite would sort through the stories and report every evening on what was most important. But today, as my friend once remarked, everyone has become their own producer, deciding with the click of a mouse or of a TV remote what is worth taking in.

So, with a daily tsunami of news, why are so many news organizations finding it tough to keep a robust staff at work? Well, it turns out, the news is not only about news, it’s also a business. The budget for my friend’s news department was measured in the tens of millions every year. Quality news reporting is expensive, and every story that gets reported needs to be vetted and carefully and clearly stated. Thank goodness here in my columns, my kindly editor doesn’t mind if I just make stuff up (Ed: wait, what? No, not even one bit!).

What are the implications of such budgets? Well, it means there are certainly going to advertisements stuck in many, many places, and unfortunately it also means that far too many news organizations on the state and local levels are cutting lots and lots of corners. I’ve been interviewed on local TV a number of times over the years due to my political activities, and even in those interactions I’ve seen changes. Stations used to send a reporter, camera operator, and sound person to do an interview. Now, the reporter (often young and poorly paid) shows up with a camera and a smile, and they set up their own shots and then head back to the station to do their editing work solo. That doesn’t leave much time to actually scrutinize the claims made by the person being interviewed. As a result, the report that airs is more likely to be a regurgitation of statements rather than a checking of facts.

Go back a century or so to a major US city and you’d find a large number of daily newspapers. New York City had over 30 and many towns had at least two that battled each other over circulation and readership. But with the closings of so many papers and the downsizing of others we find ourselves moving into a different world of information. With fewer reporters, news organizations cannot vet stories like they used to. News releases from politicians, businesses, and alike cannot be factchecked to the needed degree. Statements from public officials are more likely to be simply reported without analysis (cough…Trump on mail-in ballots…cough). 

As with nearly all my columns, I do not have any real solution to offer. Organizations like Colorado Politics will grow in importance (obviously I’m biased here, but the larger idea is valid, I think). Internet-only reporting will become the norm rather than the exception. Newspapers will likely continue to pare down their local news staffs and many may well find they need to cease paper publication altogether. My hometown paper, the Ann Arbor News, shut down a few years ago, leaving that city (like many around the nation) with no daily news at all.

So, what are the implications for the consumers of news? Well my friends, it is becoming even more important that you the news reader become even more careful in what you put into your brain. Critical thinking skills will continue to grow in importance, as you the reader will increasingly be called upon to sort out fact from fiction. 

My friend the anchorman once quoted the words of an early-20^th century newspaper columnist, who said (and I paraphrase): The job of a free press in a free society is to inform, not that it will do so perfectly at any one time or from any one source. So, what does that mean? Basically, we must read widely, from difference sources, including those you disagree with. You need to fight your way through the chaff of opinion to find the core of actual news. The situation is not likely to get any better, so everyone needs to become a more skeptical consumer of purported news stories. Your brain is the last bulwark against nonsense, use it well.

And, of course, keep reading Colorado Politics.