The Roswell Resistance: If a Tree Falls in the Forest and No One Hears….

As the corporate media kowtows, local news grows more important. Its future and democracy’s go hand-in-hand.

Representative Rich McCormack, one of the Georgia Republican Party’s right-wing poster boys, showed up for a townhall in his district last week, doubtless expecting accolades from the residents assembled in the Roswell City Hall. Sporting lapel pins reflecting his professional and military CV, the physician and Marine pilot turned Trump administration touter instead found a waiting audience, locked and loaded, that handed him his ass.

Demonstrations around the country and the deluge of phone calls to Congress make clear that, safe district or not, the Georgia Republican isn’t alone. McCormack heard constituents irate over not only Trump 2.0’s destructive debut but also the GOP congressional majority’s groveling before the self-crowned King Donald and his emerging coup d’etat. As for McCormick’s responses, his party-line prevarications didn’t go well.

But the real story about the reliably Republican voters in Roswell attacking Trump isn’t their hostile fire or his MAGA minion’s failure to dodge the incoming. It’s that the evening wouldn’t have been reported as fully or professionally, or maybe even at all if it wasn’t for local news. Among others, Greg Bluestein, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s political reporter, delivered first-rate coverage. Unfortunately, his work represents a dying trade.

As Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative has recorded for years, the demise of local news isn’t news. Some 3200 print outlets have folded since 2005; 4480 of the 5600 local print newspapers that remain in business only publish weekly. In 2024, 130 local newspapers closed or merged. Many other locals that stayed alive shrunk from daily to weekly editions or shuttered their print operations and moved on-line.

But as screens supplant the presses their product isn’t the same. Web-based news sites across the country grew in 2024—stand-alone digital news sites to 660, and network news sites to 700 last year. But on-line news offers the country less than meets the eye; 95 percent of on-line outlets are in metropolitan areas, delivering content less relevant to people in news deserts where local media are withered or gone.

While shrinking local news mostly afflicts smaller cities, towns and rural areas, their plight has national implications. For one thing, more and more Americans don’t have a clue. The 2024 report from the Northwestern Initiative tallies 206 counties across the country that lack any news source; 1561 counties have only one. That means 55 million people, or one-out-of-six citizens, have limited or no access to local news. Translation: they don’t know what’s going on in their neighborhoods, nor do Americans elsewhere.

The effects on the body politic aren’t hard to find. The Pew Research Center reports that the share of Americans who say they follow local news closely is falling—from 37 percent in 2016 to 19 percent last year. The slide is likely to get steeper, given the fact news habits form early in life. Take Gen Zs. In 2024, only nine percent among the 18-29 age group said they follow local news very closely compared to 35 percent of those 65-and-above.

The fact reporters and editors account for 45,000 of the 266,000 newspaper jobs lost since 2005 also is speeding up the public’s dumbing down. It’s not just less news coverage because of their empty chairs. It’s also a question of quality. Reporting by experienced journalists who know their beat imparts not only facts, but also an understanding of the community, the issues, and what local developments mean.

The backlash to Trump’s chaos exemplifies why local coverage matters. The most obvious reason: together the small towns are a national story. Roswell residents who ripped McCormick a new one weren’t alone. Meetings in Trinity Texas and West Bend Wisconsin and a call-in session in Oklahoma’s Fifth House District, to mention only a few recent events, also saw crowds rake safely seated Republicans over the coals.

The outrage for the moment is attracting corporate news outlets. The New York Times discovered west Texas and local TV affiliates have sent video to their national motherships to broadcast and stream. But neither the major dailies’ drop-ins or the networks’ two-minute nightly news hits offer serious insights into the local impact of Trump’s mayhem. Nor do they have a clue what reaction means in longhorn country or north woods Wisconsin down the road.

In short, if it wasn’t for the local news, north Georgia’s resistance to the mounting mendacities and mess in Washington undoubtedly would have been lost in the national noise. That risk is no less for the coming real-world consequences certain to hit small towns as well as large as a result of the mindless deconstruction of federal agencies and their services now underway.

Roswell’s residents made clear that Americans are awakening to what will soon face them. From health care to their children’s classrooms, the impact will be granular as well as national. But the facts and reactions that become stories can only be reported well if the journalist is on the scene and knows the turf. With corporate news media’s C-suites cowering, that burden falls on local news that for all-too-much of the country is simply going away.