How People In “News Deserts” Get Their News
A “news desert,” as defined by the University Of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.” A news desert can take many forms. Local news deserts are becoming more commonplace in the United States, where up to two local newspapers a week are closing. Total news deserts exist in countries like Eritrea, which has no freedom of press and strict control and censorship laws over information sharing.
In local news deserts in the United States, the poverty rate is a staggering 16 percent—a stunning five percent higher than the natural average. The average median annual income in news deserts is $15,000 less than the national average, and only about 20 percent of adults living in these communities have received a bachelor’s degree, compared to 38 percent of the U.S. national average.
For total news deserts like in Eritrea, the consequences are further reaching. Eritrea’s human rights abuses are sanctioned by the state and largely hidden from the Eritrean public. Eritrea and Ethiopia’s border skirmishes, widely reported by newsrooms throughout the world, were outright denied by the instigators. The Eritrean public deals with missing or dead people, religious persecution, and unlawful detentions with very little information at their disposal. “Information collected on people’s activities, their supposed intentions and even conjectured thoughts,” the United Nations confirmed in 2015, “are used to rule through fear.”
The situations both in the United States and in Eritrea are marked by a strange phenomenon, where close to half of the populace does not believe they are in a news desert. When the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry on Eritrea solicited comments from the public on suspected human rights abuses by President Isaias Afwerki, they were met with thousands of letters of support for his regime. In the United States, when communities living in news deserts were interviewed, people who did not believe that their communities are news deserts said they
“Believe they can access information about their community, feel more informed about their community, and are more knowledgeable about local issues like community unemployment rates, the presence of superfund sites, and poverty levels” than people who agree their community is a news desert.
Freedom of information is not available in Eritrea, but it is in the United States, which leads to another big tool that helps people in news deserts feel connected to greater society: the internet. In MediaEngagement.org’s study, 35.9 percent of respondents reported getting information about their local community from social media “every day.” Local Facebook pages appear to be occupying a major role where newsrooms have closed; of the 3,010 posts that were examined for this study, 87.7 percent were locally focused. Only eight of those posts contained any misinformation at all (0.3 percent). Of those posts, two later issued corrections.
Unfortunately, the tools it takes to understand the situation in Eritrea are not available. Journalists are regularly jailed or go missing. But the little empirical data we can gather shows us that information is simply not available to the public. In 2001, journalist Seyoum Tsehaye was taken from his home, and his family has not seen or communicated with him since. Osman Saleh, Eritrea’s foreign minister, has claimed that all seven journalists Eritrea detained around this time are still alive and in custody, despite a conflicting account from a prison guard who fled the nation in 2010. The stories are both impossible to confirm.
It’s also important to note that local communities and Eritrea itself did not start off with a lack of information. They both lost access to it as time went on. Eritrea’s democratic decline went hand-in-hand with its loss of press freedom. The U.S. is currently experiencing democratic backsliding. Though the citizens of U.S. news deserts have significantly more freedom to both seek out and contribute to the flow of information at present, the loss of local news does not bode well for American democracy.
