It was a powerful example of the importance of local news.
In early January, as enormous wildfires tore through communities across Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands of residents turned to regional media for real-time information about warnings and evacuations, to seek ways to find or offer support, and to survey the extent of the devastation. According to a report by Nielsen, on January 8 alone, Angelenos watched more than 1.1 billion minutes of local TV news and listened to 97 million minutes of local radio — spikes that continued for days and weeks afterward. In the aftermath of the disaster, experts credited area journalists with helping to filter out misinformation, better understand and report on-the-ground conditions, and ultimately keep residents safe.
Beyond updating people in emergency situations, local news is critical for many other reasons, says Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard. From reporting on regional matters to holding public officials and private enterprise accountable, local media discourages corruption, increases civic participation, and contributes to a “sense that we are a shared community,” she says.
But local news — like other traditional media — is in crisis, says Minow. In 2021, Minow wrote a book called “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech,” in which she described what she and many others see as the dire challenges facing media organizations — and some ideas on to address them.
A strong advocate for public media, Minow was recently elected the chair of the board of trustees of Boston’s GBH, the largest producer of content for PBS in the country.
“I’m so honored to have the chance to work with really talented and dedicated people who make public media what it is and what it could be,” Minow says. She noted that the new role has particular meaning to her because her father Newton N. Minow, who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President John F. Kennedy, played a pioneering role in launching public media in the United States.
In an interview with Harvard Law Today, Minow explains the media’s role in shaping democracy, why she is passionate about supporting public media like GBH — and what happens when local newsrooms disappear.
Harvard Law Today: In addition to many other areas of expertise, you are a First Amendment scholar and have written extensively on media and its important role in a democratic society. Could you tell us a bit about that role historically?
Martha Minow: It’s interesting. There’s only one private industry that’s mentioned in the United States Constitution, and it is the press. I don’t think it’s by accident. The framers of the Constitution, who were also great students of the history of democracy and political theory, understood that access to information and the exchange of ideas are two central features for self-governance and for the construction of a political community. Thomas Jefferson wrote his friend Marquis de Lafayette, “the only security of all is in a free press.” And at various points, he and other founding fathers talked about the significance of the press, both in forming the union and in maintaining democratic society. The fact is, the Constitution itself would never have been ratified if it weren’t circulated through the press. The local debates and conversations about it, and ratification, required mass participation.
To be able to have information about what’s going on locally and more broadly is a way for individuals to take responsibility for not only their own interests, but also the interests of those around them. It is striking that, when a community lacks media to cover public and private power, there’s good empirical evidence that both public and private corruption increases. The media exposes misconduct, and it equips a population to self-govern.
HLT: Where did your interest in local news came from, and why it is it important to you to be involved with an organization like GBH?
Minow: I was a student journalist — I’m sure that is part of it. But also, I had the opportunity as a young person, and then as I became a professional, to see the role of journalism in public affairs. That includes the role of the media in the Watergate scandal, which was a formative time for me I was in college, and the role of media, more recently, for example, in identifying the lead in the water in Flint, Michigan and helping people advocate for their own health.
It’s also had a big impact in my own life and in the lives of people around me. I have been a great consumer of local news, and I’m a fan of public media in particular. As a parent, to be able to share the kinds of children’s media that public media produces, which is educational rather than selling something unhealthy such as sugar cereals, that was very meaningful. I also love the science shows, like “Nova.” I see media at its best as cultivating a sense of wonder.
HLT: What are some of the challenges you see with respect to local media today?
Minow: Unfortunately, it’s a crisis time for media of all kinds, but for local news in particular. The business model that has worked in the past — which relied on advertising and subscriptions — is no longer a viable one. The U.S. has seen a loss of over 3,000 newspapers in the last two decades. Over half the communities in the United States have only one local news outlet — and many have none. Local news is most in jeopardy, but all media is in a free fall.
Some of that has to do with otherwise great developments, such as the digital revolution, which has meant that content can be shared easily anywhere in the world. But social media platforms have also taken the advertising dollars away from traditional media.
The digital revolution led to many experiments, and one experiment that traditional media tried was to give away their content for free, with the hope that that would generate interest and subscriptions. It has not. In fact, it has generated an expectation that people get content for free. Social media has also led to the sharing of professional journalism without paying for it.
The digital communication revolution also means that the barriers to gathering news, reporting on it, and more importantly, sharing your own opinion on it, are almost nonexistent. It seems like sharing content is free, although people are also sharing their personal data. There are almost no gatekeepers. And there are digital business models depending on eye-balls — numbers of views. What that means is that we have lots of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation out there. These are all major problems.
“To be able to have information about what’s going on locally and more broadly is a way for individuals to take responsibility for not only their own interests, but also the interests of those around them.”
HLT: What happens when professional local journalism goes away?
Minow: Well, we know corruption increases. Another thing that happens is that voting rates decline. People’s participation in politics goes down. But I also think even more fundamentally, there is a loss of a sense of “we,” — a sense that we are a shared community. People may have found different communities online or in other ways, but the sense that you have anything in common with your neighbor — that you can still connect with people even if you disagree with them on some things — that becomes more fragile.
HLT: How do you view the impact of social media and the role of “citizen journalists”? Is this a positive development?
Minow: There is a positive side. Tragically, here in Boston, we had the Marathon bomber experience, and it was residents who, with their phone cameras, took pictures and reported on what they saw, what they suspected, and these efforts helped to capture the perpetrator. Citizen journalism is also very valuable in environmental matters. For example, consider the people who are reporting on the decline in birds, butterflies, water quality, etc. We also had the Arab Spring that seemed to be enabling people, even in repressive societies, to communicate and to be politically engaged—until repressive governments shut down internet access.
But the downside of nonprofessional journalism is the lack of standards. Professional journalists follow standards such as verifying sources, double checking, triangulating to make sure that the information is reliable. Lowering the barriers to entry so that many more voices from many different communities is great, but without some of the good journalistic practices that have developed over time, we get the rapidly declining trust that people experience now with any content they receive.
HLT: In what ways has the U.S. government been involved with bolstering public media in the past?
Minow: It’s fascinating how the U.S. government has long been involved in bolstering media, period. The founders gave the authority for creating a post office as one of the powers of Congress. Congress, very early on, exercised that power and immediately gave a reduced rate for the press to allow the press to exchange for free their own materials. Within a short period of time, early newspapers were sharing for free their content with other newspapers or presses in their communities and beyond. That’s an example that has been followed over time with support or subsidies by the government, for example, in the development of the telegraph or in the research that led to the internet that was federal funded. Even the algorithm that is a predecessor to what Google became was a National Science Foundation grant.
The licensing of broadcast is a very direct involvement of the government, and that started with radio, expanded to television, and there was some regulation of cable, all with the recognition that if there isn’t a traffic cop, then there’s just cacophony. The scarcity of the airwaves justified governmental involvement in broadcast, and licenses—granted for very little expense — carried, historically, a public service duty. The internet changed all that. Scarcity is not the condition of content distribution anymore. Limitations of the physical reality are far less significant than limitation of the human brain — how much we can absorb is the real limit now.
I want to mention that public media began with a recognition that with the scarcity of broadcast licenses, there was a lack of certain kinds of content, such as children’s media or science. The creation of public media was a dream that a couple of communities in the country pioneered — Boston was one, Chicago was another. I was lucky to have been the daughter of a man who was very involved in the creation of the public broadcast system — my father was chair of the Federal Communications Commission under President Kennedy, and so I learned a lot about these issues when I was growing up. To see the role that public media has played around the world in elevating the arts and science, in pioneering children’s shows — that has been meaningful in my own life too.
HLT: Your book also outlines some reforms that could help address some of the problems you identify. Can you explain a few of your ideas?
Minow: In the book, I argue that there is not only permission for the federal government to support the news media; there’s an obligation to do so because of the significance of the media to the operation of a functioning democracy. My proposals for reform fall into three basic categories. The first category is to tackle one of the major sources of the current and ongoing crisis, which is the behavior of the social media companies. Not only do they take advertising dollars without investing revenues to support reliable news or other content; they amplify fraudulent, misleading, and harmful materials. One reform would impose legal requirements for them to have the same responsibilities as other actors in media. Just as an example, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exempts social media platforms from liability for ordinary laws — in other words, laws that apply to the Boston Globe don’t apply to Facebook. Such immunity should at least be in exchange for some duties to protect the public.
A second category of possible reforms would directly protect the readers or the consumers of news with consumer protection rules, tort law, and requirements of transparency by social media platforms, and competition around curation of digital content. The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to provide a fair amount of latitude for lies, but we’ve always had a First Amendment coexisting with laws against defamation and libel, and we’ve also long had truth in advertising rules and rules against fraud. I think we should enforce these rules, even in the social media context.
“We’ve long had truth in advertising rules and rules against fraud … I think we should enforce these rules, even in the social media context.”
The third bucket of proposals I develop in the book involves government support for public alternatives, and also for media education. And yes, that includes public media. Support for public media over the past half-century has brought invaluable educational and cultural materials to the broad public. Resources for such support could come in part from taxing the big internet companies and using at least some of the revenues to support public media. Philanthropy and each individual and family can also support quality media. I currently chair the MacArthur Foundation, which is one of over 70 philanthropies behind an initiative called Press Forward, which is supporting local news. Sometimes that may involve helping a for-profit news organization convert to become a nonprofit and to find ways to have multiple different sources of revenues. Other efforts could support legal changes like the tax credits for people who subscribe to their local media or to local media that hire new reporters, or help the local providers come up with more efficient ways to pool their back-office work or use artificial intelligence tools for efficient work including summarizing minutes of public meetings. I think that media education is equally important. I think that people really need to understand what information they’re getting, where it’s coming from, how to read critically, how to test what they’re getting, how to look for multiple points of view, but not treat every source of information as if it’s the same.
HLT: How can we as individuals support local news?
Minow: One thing an individual can do is take out a subscription to a local paper or service. There are new local papers, podcasts, and blogs–little green shoots in some of the communities where papers have folded up or even local broadcast has ended, where there are new ones starting to take root. We should support them.
With respect to public media, you can become a member, watch the content, contribute to it, come to events. There are lots of ways to get involved. One of the things that I especially love about GBH, and it’s related to my longstanding interest in education for young people, is its involvement in providing award-winning and engaging videos and materials for K-12 education with a focus on science, social studies, and civics. This exemplifies the vision of media as advancing the promise of education and opening up worlds for people that I so much love about GBH. I get great joy out of learning something from public media, and I hope other people do too.
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