Democracy requires an informed citizenry. An informed citizenry requires journalism. Journalism requires resources, independence, and protection. All three are under unprecedented threat in 2026.
Local newsrooms have been decimated. Since 2005, the United States has lost more than a third of its newspapers — over 3,200 outlets, most of them local. The communities left behind are what researchers call “news deserts” — places where no one is covering the city council, the school board, the local courts, the zoning decisions that shape daily life. Corruption thrives in the dark. News deserts are dark by definition.
At the national level, media consolidation has placed most of what Americans watch and read in the hands of a small number of corporations and billionaires with their own political and financial interests. The line between news and entertainment has been deliberately blurred. Platforms that distribute news to billions of people bear no responsibility for its accuracy. And now artificial intelligence threatens to flood the information environment with synthetic content at a scale and speed that human verification cannot match.
The threats to press freedom are not only economic. They are political. The use of legal harassment, bogus defamation suits, and government pressure to silence journalists and outlets is a defining feature of authoritarian consolidation everywhere it has occurred. It is occurring here.
Solutions include public funding for local journalism through nonprofit models, strong shield laws protecting journalists and their sources, antitrust enforcement against media monopolies, and platform accountability for the algorithmic amplification of misinformation.
But the deeper question is: what does a healthy information ecosystem look like? How do we build the civic infrastructure for truth in the 21st century?
What does a free, independent, and trustworthy press look like? Submit your vision.