This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 16 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, and this is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Victor Pickard. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the media and its effect on politics and society. And he’s also a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and they had an interesting report last week on the media and its problems, and why the American media is not the sort of tool for democracy that it should be.

So, Professor, welcome.

Victor Pickard: Thanks Perry. Thanks for having me.

Bacon: So I’m going to start—there’s like 40 pages in the report. It covers a lot of media history, but I’m going to try to condense it and ask you at the start: If you had to describe the two biggest problems with our current media structure, what would you say they are?

Pickard: That’s a tough question because I want to go with three, but I’ll do …

Bacon: Three is fine. Three is good, though. Let’s do three.

Pickard: OK. Magic number three. So I would identify… three major problems facing the U.S. today, in terms of our media system and how it functions within a democratic society, would be the collapse of local journalism, the defunding of our public media, and the what we might think of as runaway consolidation of our news media.

And I think those three problems are major, major, major challenges facing us if we do want to be a democratic society. But they all also have these structural roots that we try to bring out in our report. We really try to historicize—we answer the question: How did we get here? What policy decisions led to these predicaments?—because so many of the problems that we’re grappling with are really symptoms of deeper structural pathologies.

And so we’re really trying to bring that out into the report to make this ultimate argument that if we care about the future democracy, we really need to center these media-related problems. So we really need to make structural media reform a major focus of any pro-democracy movement.

So, in a nutshell, I’ve pretty much described the report, but of course there are plenty of details that we can geek out on.

Bacon: The three things you said were: the cloud—local media defunding, public media, and then the sort of corporate takeover of the mainstream media, essentially.

Let’s focus on local media first, because that is a long-standing problem that’s not related to Trump, really. That’s been an issue for a long time. Basically, local newspapers ran on classified advertising for decades, and then the internet kind of ended that business, and they don’t have an alternative revenue source.

That’s kind of the short story there. Well, give the longer version of that story, if you like. I gave it a pretty short account. What’s the long version? Is that pretty much it?

Pickard: I mean, that is it in a nutshell. But I really would want to underscore that this wasn’t inevitable. It really was the result of these, again, structural problems, where we allowed our print media system to become so dependent on advertising revenue. OK, so oftentimes the lazy narrative is that the internet broke local journalism, but that’s not exactly correct.

Yeah, it really was this overreliance—and I would say this hypercommercialization—of what should be seen as a public good, the same way we treat public education in this country. So I feel like that is the fundamental problem. And then when advertisers and readers migrated to the web, newspapers lost their monopolistic position in their respective markets; then suddenly that market—that business model—fell apart, and it’s never coming back.

So we’re dealing with market failure, and the really only solution to systemic market failure is to come up with public solutions. And I think that’s what we sort of tee up with this report—

Bacon: Hold on. Let’s ask one question. OK, so local media—do we really mean local newspapers, or do we mean local … because local TV—it’s worth delineating it a little bit. Local TV and local newspapers are in different places, right? Local TV has done better, I think.

Pickard: Oh, that depends. OK. I would still say that even in their beleaguered state, the primary source of original reporting we’re not reporting.

Bacon: What I mean is the economics of local TV are better, is what I was trying to get at.

Pickard: Yes, that’s right. Not suffering nearly as much. And just to put a couple quick, very grim numbers on this problem: So since the early 2000s, we’ve lost nearly 40 percent of our local newspapers. We’ve lost 75 percent of our newspaper journalists. And a key point here is that it’s not just about nostalgia for this old model or ink-stained fingers from rustling through the broadsheets, but it really is because that journalism is not being replaced anywhere.

The newspaper industry served as this kind of informational feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we lose those institutions. We’ve lost that journalism. That’s why we should be so deeply concerned about this.

And just one other benchmark: Where in the early 2000s we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States, we’re now down to 8.2 journalists per 100,000 people, so that means that tens of millions of Americans are living in news deserts. We all learn in school that democracy requires a free and, by implication, a functional press system.

And now we have the studies to show what happens—these kind of natural experiments—what happens when a local community loses its local news media? Sure enough, they’re less likely to vote, they’re less civically engaged. They have lower levels of political knowledge, higher levels of corruption, higher levels of polarization, and extreme right-wing politics.

So we know for sure—we can empirically show—that this is bad for democracy.

Bacon: Let me make two other points on state and local news here. Two other points I wanted to ask about. We think the news deserts are disproportionately in rural areas, small towns. Is that correct?

Pickard: Yes, but I would qualify that because there are many areas—especially communities of color—that have never been well served by a commercial media system. So in many ways, we’re all living in news deserts increasingly, even in urban areas across the United States.

But you’re absolutely right. If you look at the map where the news deserts are, they disproportionately spread across these rural areas. And also, that’s why our public media are so important for those areas, which is something maybe we’ll get into.

Bacon: Let me ask one question about the local. So, I assume a lot of people who are going to listen to this are living in cities—particularly, the audience........

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