A few days ago I wrote an article about the slow investigative process of the murder of a journalist which occurred in 2022, in a small Colombian municipality. The victim, Mardonio Mejía, ran a community radio station and broadcast a daily radio program with the main information about San Pedro, his city and its surroundings. Many of the area’s 5,000 residents listened to him nonstop. While I was working on the sources to write the article, the testimony of one interviewee particularly caught my attention: just a week after the crime, when he made a field visit to San Pedro, he was surprised by the silence that surrounded that town with a musical tradition. When he asked for explanations they told him that, with Mardonio’s death, the only local radio had been turned off.
A blow to reality: what happens in a community when the only means of communication that connected it to information and the public is turned off?
San Pedro’s story is not a unique one, but is repeated in many parts of the world, because the murder is no exception among the attacks against journalists and the media. But the meaning changes drastically when it takes place in a small town, since there the media and journalists are much closer to the population and become a key element in bringing the public closer to the citizens. This is why the breakdown of this relationship seriously undermines democracy.
Local journalism allows residents of a rural area to learn about issues in their community. In some cities, for example, the messages sent by community radios become the only way to know the situation on the roads, public works or health days. They are the tool with which the residents of a river municipality can find out about an alert due to the flooding of a river or about landslides caused by natural phenomena, but also about what is happening in other areas of their country.
Unfortunately, for multiple reasons, local journalism is currently experiencing a structural crisis. A study conducted by the Gabo Foundation on local news ecosystems in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) showed that more than 65% of territories have no local news, meaning that most communities live in contexts where journalism is limited, has failed to establish itself in a stable way or faces precarious conditions for its exercise.
There is a lot of talk about the difficult economic situation of the media, but very little about what it means to survive doing local journalism. Advertising is increasingly scarce and on many occasions it is used as a control tool. This economic pressure, in turn, leads to self-censorship and the demise of the media. “No news is bad news.” That’s what the magazine says Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), based on studies showing that the absence of local news fuels polarization, decreases voter participation, and reduces government accountability.
In some cities, local media are used to convene the population to decide on their development plans or to participate in hearings where complex and fundamental issues for their lives will be agreed, such as preventive consultations or permits for the entry of new businesses. This participation in their future is an opportunity often mediated by broadcasters, where they can listen to different voices or even talk to public officials, learn about their actions and ask them for transparency. The role of local communication, in fact, can also be read as a tool to fight corruption.
When it comes to electoral issues, the issue becomes more serious. These media help communities understand what is at stake in local elections and can even enable them to participate in voting. But they are also a space that ends up taking over illegality. In Colombia, as violence increases, illegal armed groups seek to exert much stronger governance in everything local, and information management is key in this regard. To achieve this goal, they use intimidation and threats.
So, without local media, where do rural voters find their news? This is where academics increasingly agree that social networks come to occupy these information deserts, polarizing the political environment of communities.
The lack of local information weakens democracy, especially because spaces for responsibility disappear and corruption takes advantage of it. We are therefore talking about a void that social networks cannot fill. The possibility of obtaining information through social networks and abandoning local media introduces an avalanche of information where it is very difficult to distinguish what is real from what is false or insidious. Furthermore, it puts the agenda of communities in competition with the decisions of large platforms, adding to the violence and economic vulnerability that politicians who want to manipulate information take advantage of.
In any case, it is not desirable for what Bernardo Díaz Nosty stated in his “hypothesis of degraded democracy” to be achieved at a local level, according to which the press would bet on the survival and generation of profit of mercantilism, with which democracy would be degraded. Perhaps the main antidote to all this, as well as to misinformation and polarization, is the local media.
The question remains of how to create the ideal conditions to practice local journalism without restrictions and in a stable way. I believe the solution lies in a collective effort to protect and strengthen it. Therefore, another question would be: who is willing to do this?
