Partisan news outlets fill gaps left by local news cutbacks - Entrepreneur Generations

As local news coverage falls across the nation, partisan news outlets are flourishing—and sometimes readers aren't aware of the bias, Lauren Smiley reports for Columbia Journalism Review.

Yellowhammer News is a prime example. It looks like a news site at first glance, but it's conservative to the core: Republican political advisor Cliff Sims founded it in 2013, but recently sold his interest to Tim Howe and John Ross, both former directors of the Alabama Republican Party, in order to work as a communications aide in President Trump's White House, Smiley reports. Many of Yellowhammer's contributors also write for similarly slanted Breitbart.

Sims founded Yellowhammer only months after Advance Local merged The Birmingham News and three other publications into AL.com. The layoffs and reduced print schedule at AL.com made for a local news gap Sims was happy to fill. Yellowhammer makes no bones about its chief competitor, and recently urged its readers to reject AL.com, Smiley reports.

Yellowhammer carries enough decent journalism to muddy the waters about its bias, including Associated Press wire stories and a 2016 scoop about how Republican governor Robert Bentley ordered state law enforcement to deliver his forgotten wallet with a helicopter. It also hid the fact that Howe and Ross were owners until 2014, when an independent journalist published a leaked email between Sims and Howe, Smiley reports.

Why try to hide its affiliations? Because readers tend to trust local newspapers more, a tendency exploited by those trying to peddle a narrative. "It’s telling that, when Russian disinformation agents of the Internet Research Agency created Twitter profiles to meddle in US politics, they often chose names that sounded like local newspapers," Smiley reports.

"Yellowhammer is merely a relatively mature example of the attempts to create alternative local news outlets that capitalize on America’s media polarization where it dovetails with community news credibility," Smiley reports. "And as local newsrooms continue to be wiped out, other untested publishers are rushing into the void."

Another example is Kentucky Today, a publication of the Kentucky Baptist Convention launched in 2015 and run by a former AP reporter. In addition to its original content, it offers free wire articles to 15 local papers in Western Kentucky, a tempting alternative to expensive AP wire subscriptions. Not all of the alternative publications are conservative: The Greenville Gazette in South Carolina has a decidedly liberal slant, Smiley reports.

Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, said biased publications like Yellowhammer aren't a new trend, but rather a return to an old one. "We're reverting to a bad old form," he told Smiley, referring to the pre-Civil War days when many papers were openly partisan.

Part of the problem is that social media makes it harder to identify trustworthy information sources easier to live in an ideological echo chamber. And it's no coincidence that biased news sources are proliferating as legitimate local news suffers cutbacks. Outlets like Yellowhammer "are filling the gaps," Cross told Smiley, "But I’m afraid the audience isn’t always aware it’s from a certain perspective."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2Nwe42s Partisan news outlets fill gaps left by local news cutbacks - Entrepreneur Generations

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