The loss of local news is linked with increased government secrecy, according to a new study conducted by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida.
The findings lend the first empirical evidence to the connection long intuited between the declining health of local news ecosystems and decreased government transparency. They add to the growing body of research that demonstrates the impact of news deserts on democracy, including increased partisanship, lower voter participation, and diminished civic engagement.
“Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center and author of the report. “Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they’re taking advantage of that.”
To measure transparency, Cuillier and his colleague Brett Posner-Ferdman, a law student at Penn State, requested the same seven records from 44 state governments under each state’s public records law. They found that the states with fewer newspapers per capita were more likely to deny or ignore their requests. They also found that responsiveness to requests improved in states with stronger press associations. Overall, about a quarter of requests were fully complied with, while another quarter were outright denied or not responded to.
The Medill Local News Initiative has tracked a net loss of more than 3,300 local newspapers and 45,000 newspaper journalists in the US since 2005. Those losses represent drops of about 33% and 60%, respectively.
The researchers did not find a significant connection between the density of digital-only local news sites and government transparency. Cuillier argued that these typically small start-ups can’t be expected to replace the work once done by large newspaper teams.
“They’re stretched so thin in trying to produce content that they often don’t have time to pursue public records, let alone sue for them,” Cuillier said of digital-only local news sites.
Former Washington Post journalist and Fulbright Scholar Miranda Spivack explained that government secrecy can take its most damaging form at the state and local levels where most citizens encounter government. She documented local officials’ attempts to hide critical information about issues ranging from toxic chemicals in firefighter gear to dirty drinking water in her book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back” published earlier this year.
“It paralyzes communities in a lot of ways,” Spivack said of local governments’ noncompliance with transparency laws. “It puts a lot of power in the hands of officials and private companies, usually, that they’re doing business with.”
Medill researchers requested records from a sample of 165 news desert counties earlier this year, looking to learn who, if anyone, was requesting records from these local governments. Almost half did not respond to the requests. Of the 54 counties that produced records in full, more than 70% received no records requests from journalists in a full year.
In many cases, news desert counties are small and rural. Cindy Ornsbey, the county clerk and recorder in Slope County, North Dakota said she had no memory of any records requests in her five years on the job. “The population here is about 740 people,” Ornsbey wrote over email. “There would be no reason that any news media organizations would need any records from Podunk.”
Long wait times and copying fees also stood in the way of access to documents, both in Medill’s look at the local level and Cuillier’s look at the state level. The Department of Natural Resources in Iowa asked Cuillier for more than $16,000 for access to records on hunting and fishing licenses.
Cuillier listed four paths toward improving government compliance with records requests: Strengthened local news ecosystems; stronger laws that mandate attorney’s fees and monetary penalties if an agency is found improperly withholding documents; independent information commissions in each state; and bolstered litigation efforts.
He noted The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has made strides on this final point. It launched the Local Legal Initiative in 2020 to provide on-the-ground legal support for local journalists with backing from the Knight Foundation and Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic coalition working to strengthen local news.
Eric Feder, the director of the Local Legal Initiative, explained that the initial request is only the starting point of the battle for public records. He hopes that increased litigation from initiatives like his can change the culture around government transparency.
“Bringing a lawsuit gets results,” Feder said. “It doesn’t win every time, but keeping the pressure on, holding agencies accountable has this almost immediate effect.”
