A Local Escape from Journalism’s Epistemological Trap

That journalism has let politics force it into an epistemological corner is an indictment of national corporate-owned media.

The professional habits that characterize national political journalism — official sourcing, procedural neutrality, and “both sides” objectivity — only even marginally function when the parties involved are acting in good faith. When that tradition collapses, journalism is exploitable. Repeating the ‘Big Lie’, playing the refs, and bad-faith arguments are not bugs, they are features. Journalism kept following the old rules. Right-wing politics is breaking them.

What failed here is not just ethics or courage, but adaptability. The inability of national political media to adjust to the new rules was informed by declining revenues, industry consolidation, platform power, and the pursuit of scale over trust. These structural pressures reward shareholder-safe uniformity, narrative risk-aversion, and centralized control, even as the informational environment demands practical judgment, full context, and a confident assertion of shared facts.

As a result, journalism can now either report that it is raining and be accused of partisanship, or it can dither and become irrelevant. The national political press has chosen the latter. The advice for publishers and residents is aligned: be local media and read local media.

At the metro level and below, this problem is not editorial; it is organizational. The abstract nature of conglomerate structures creates the appearance of local autonomy while eliminating any possibility of actual local heterodoxy. Local management is left with a sign on the front door and a handful of reporters, but without meaningful control over priorities, resources, or risk.

For these local offices of national news groups to maintain relevance, their corporate owners need to reevaluate what truly can be centralized and what must remain local. Digital information management created the false impression that almost everything — from copy editing to IT, and how to represent and serve local interests — could be extracted from the local publisher or general manager and handed to a distant central office.

An example today: if the Minnesota Star Tribune were owned by an out-of-state corporation specifically unconcerned with the local civic good, could this editorial have been written?

I have framed the debate as one about local ownership. But it is as much about local control. And on both counts, the pendulum has swung far too far away from the local — following the logic of Big Tech, scale, and consolidation — at the expense of trust, relevance, and community needs.

Journalism cannot outsource local judgment and then wonder why it no longer commands belief.