Hope flickers to 'irrigate' the state's news deserts

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter, but I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”

— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Edward Carrington

Jefferson’s letter to Carrington, a fellow Virginian and an officer in the Continental Army, written in January 1787, a few months before work began on the U.S. Constitution, spoke to what Jefferson and others of the Framers would establish as a key right in the First Amendment and its necessity in informing and guiding the new nation.

Nearly 240 years later, Jefferson might not have imagined that the nation might actually be edging closer to the former, government without newspapers.

A parched landscape: News deserts — whole counties and regions of the nation without a local source of news and information — have grown over the last 20 years, according to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Almost 40 percent of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished in that time, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local and regional news. And the newsrooms that remain — at newspapers, online publications and radio and TV stations — have seen devastating cuts that have laid off experienced journalists and diminished their ability to cover their communities.

https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/28/editorial-hope-flickers-to-irrigate-the-states-news-deserts/