OPINION: Bipartisan bill would help alleviate news deserts

This editorial was published in the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Whether you’re considering how to vote on a school levy, what to do to stay healthy during flu season or how new county building codes might affect your home, you need accurate, balanced information.

Not sales pitches disguised as news reports. Not weird links that’ll take you down rabbit holes full of misinformation. Not political propaganda.

But in communities like ours, that’s getting harder to find. More than 200 rural areas across the United States, in fact, are now designated as “news deserts” because they lack access to professional local journalism, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism reports.

It doesn’t take a media analyst to define the problem: Newspapers have been dropping like flies in the past two decades. Fewer than 5,600 remain in the U.S. — down roughly a third from 2005. And most of the ones that remain can no longer afford to print daily editions.

Local broadcast news, meantime, isn’t exactly picking up the slack, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association. And good luck getting straight information from an increasingly undisciplined internet obsessed with memes and riddled with fake news.

State Sens. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, and Matt Boehnke, R-Kennewick, however, have a bipartisan proposal to counter all this.

They’re cosponsoring Senate Bill 5400, which was introduced in a hearing before the Senate Labor and Commerce Committee earlier this week.

The bill would establish a $20 million annual fund that could subsidize eligible news organizations working to create civic news content in underserved communities by raising an existing tax on the state’s largest tech companies.

The Department of Commerce would oversee the fund with help from the Employment Security Department. The additional money could mean around $13,000 for each working reporter and editor at qualifying newspapers.

That would go a long way toward bringing more thorough local coverage to communities across the state.

It would mean more meaningful stories, deeper analyses and wider perspectives on issues affecting places like the Yakima Valley.

Most of us got into journalism as a means of serving our communities. We continue to think better information translates into better local decisions.

So we support the passage of this bill for one simple reason: We believe it’ll help us serve you better.

TNS