“The media deserts generate a real crisis of citizenship”, headlines the american newspaper The Washington Post. In the United States, the local press is in decline and this puts democracy in danger, explains in the columns of the title the columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel, also director of the left-wing magazine The Nation.
“Since 2005, the United States has lost a quarter of its newspapers; every week two new posts close.”
Half of the country’s press titles are also controlled by financial companies. “Some journalistic deserts keep a ‘ghost newspaper’, which is no more than a shadow of what it was after having been absorbed by a bigger title or so ‘slimmed’ that its employees can only be counted on the fingers of one hand”, continues the journalist.
As a result, 70 million Americans are deprived of a decent local newspaper. It is news coverage in rural and often poor locations that suffers, “and we suffer the consequences every day”, alert
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