Why the Decline of Local Media Could Be a Security Risk

The United States may be heading towards a period of strategic surprise, and the erosion of local media is a major reason why. According to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, by the end of 2025, the United States will have lost a third of its newspapers in the past 20 years. This hollowing out of local media creates an opening for adversarial actors to influence the country in unexpected and even subversive ways.

To more effectively counter this instability, we need to have access to good quality information at a local level. Insofar as publicly available sources of information are required to understand the drivers of political instability at home, the United States is left increasingly at risk.

The decline of local media is, in this sense, a form of disarmament. Not only will its absence exacerbate difficulties of local governance and accelerate political extremism, but it will also open up blind spots that adversaries both foreign and domestic can leverage to their benefit.

Outside actors can manipulate news reporting for subversive purposes. Indeed, they already have. Local, reliable sources of information could help fight back against this. That such local and reliable news outlets have been in such steep decline only worsens matters. Allowing for the continued decline of local media renders our homeland security efforts half blind.

There is evidence of the ordinary activities of journalists carrying out their job proving useful in uncovering adversarial influence operations and alerting the public of potential vulnerabilities. In Southeast Asia, for example, investigative journalists have helped uncover major influence operations. Lest one believe the United States is invulnerable to similar efforts, the interior of the country is already regularly penetrated by other states: China has hacked critical infrastructure systems in the United States, Iran hacked the city of Atlanta, North Korea hacked Sony Pictures, and Russia has infiltrated U.S. real estate.

Sometimes these activities take years to be uncovered, leaving open a window where an adversary can subvert the United States prior to detection. China's “Volt Typhoon” hack, for example, took place for half a decade before the public became aware of it. Local journalists would be among those responsible actors whose job is to let the public know of vulnerabilities and attacks. Sometimes even when government actors know an attack took place, the people affected are still not informed.

Local journalists can investigate the ways in which events like these—often out of sight and mind from major policymakers in Washington—are connected to a bigger picture, be it ordinary day to day life in small-town America, or yet another data point in an ever-growing list of adversarial subversion. There is no reason to believe that citizens and policymakers are helpless to stop the decline of local media. Grant offering institutions—such as the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Center for Public Integrity, and Public Media Alliance—provide support for local media sources; outlets like ProPublica's Local Reporting Network provide support for local journalists; last year the MacArthur Foundation announced it would make a $500 million investment in local news.

Such efforts must be supported and cannot be allowed to fail. There might also be other ways to provide support to local news organizations or otherwise share costs across different media groups across the country. Saving local news is actually a problem that is much more easily solved than one might expect.

Together, efforts to restore local media hold the potential to do more than make our democracy more resilient. It might also be the first step to ensuring we are not surprised by a security threat.