"California has a problem. It's not homelessness, a lack of housing or the state's increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at length. It's truth decay. If you believe that information is the taproot of knowledge and expanding personal vistas is key to learning, there's a case to be made that the great Golden State - quietly, with scant notice - is growing more impoverished by the day."
"In the last quarter of a century, a third of California newsrooms have closed. Nearly 7 in 10 journalists have lost their jobs. The relentlessly cruel economics of the news business, driven in good part by the voracious profiteering of monoliths such as Google and Facebook, has devastated the industry - including the newsroom that employs your friendly columnist - drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the rest of the country, vastly worse off."
"There's an information vacuum and that space is filling up with garbage. Increasingly, the daily diet of "news" that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely style themselves as prophets of the unvarnished truth. (If you genuinely can't differentiate between news and commentary, such as this, or between those making an honest attempt to present a fair, all-things-considered account of events versus someone shaving, eliding and shoehorning facts to fit a predetermined narrative,"
California has lost a third of its newsrooms and 70% of journalists over 25 years. The collapsing economics of news, driven largely by Google and Facebook profiteering, has reduced newsroom output and staffing. An information vacuum has emerged and is increasingly filled by partisan, propagandist and self-interested sources posing as objective news. A proposed $175-million state-Google investment to fund local journalism faltered as the governor removed the program from the latest budget proposal. Difficulty distinguishing news from commentary exacerbates the problem and encourages audiences to seek alternate content, undermining public knowledge and civic accountability.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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