Fascinating @Politico finding that totally affirms what I saw on the ground in 2016: Trump heavily outperformed both Hillary and Romney in places where the presence of local newspapers was weakest. politico.com/story/2018/04/…
I've thought a lot about this and have a few theories for why it might be so: 1) It’s a lot easier to hate the media if you don’t know anyone in the media. If you don’t see hardworking reporters any more at your town hall or courthouse or high school football game, “the media”...
to you means something totally foreign—it’s just Wolf and Anderson and the pundits and the guys who come to town with the candidate or president and are penned in the back of the room. So when the candidate or prez starts railing against the media, you turn and glare at them...
because you have no idea who they are. They’re people from elsewhere with nice clothes and sharp-looking glasses.
2) If you don't have local news, it’s going to affect your politics, whether and how you vote. It’s going to go make you feel more disconnected from any sort of community and civic fabric. It's going to make you feel isolated, and open to messages that prey on alienation.
And 3) it’s going to send you in search of information elsewhere. One reason it was so easy to target many voters in these places with Facebook was that it really has become THE source for voters totally cut off from traditional news sources.
Take Tracie, the Miamisburg OH Obama-Trump voter featured in this piece propublica.org/article/reveng… She doesn't get the Dayton Daily News. Two local stations are owned by Sinclair. She surfed the Web and read a lot on Facebook. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said...
“It’s a shame," she added. "They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”
