I think print journalism has already largely collapsed, and will continue to deteriorate over time. I have no real solutions to this.
On a national level, corruption is already present, and yes, the decline in print journalism isn’t helping. On a local level, it depends on what media is present in that particular market, and this is where the decline of newspapers and local media is the most troubling. Newspapers used to cover all kinds of goings-on: council meetings, street repairs, social events, obituaries, new and departing businesses, school board meetings, etc., etc.
As newspapers cut back on publication (my hometown newspaper, for example, now only publishes three days a week. While it does its best to offer a lot of coverage of the examples I gave above, the limited space on the days it does publish means inevitably a lot doesn’t get shared with the public.), more and more of what happens in our local area either doesn’t get coverage, or it is shared on websites where the information can be distorted, upvoted/downvoted, relegated to a lesser-seen link or page, etc., etc. The move to online news also exacerbates the divide between those with access to computers and those that don’t.
This loss of access to news tears a hole in the political and social fabric of the community, and increases the risk that only a certain number of people will be engaged in what’s happening in their own area.
It also doesn’t help that both local and regional newspapers do not invest in their national news desk, and instead rely on wire stories from AP or Reuters. This means someone who only subscribes to their hometown newspaper gets fed only a certain number of stories, news items that are restricted by a number of factors (what AP/Reuters, etc. chooses to cover; what the local papers are willing to pick from the national news feeds; and finally, space in the newspaper. I used to work in a newspaper composing department, and quite a few stories would get chopped, usually from the bottom up, to fit the available space. So what’s originally written and disseminated is not what you see at the end (this is probably one of the few advantages of the internet; the story in full can be easily published)). So that means their comprehension about any number of topics becomes restricted even further.
Add to that the increasingly smaller number of owners of newspapers, radio, TV, etc, and the monopolies these owners have been allowed to build. So while it may not be “corruption” per se, you definitely will get slanted or limited coverage in a large regional area (a market that is largely controlled by Sinclair, for example, will add additional conservative bias to a region, whether it is already conservative to begin with or merely sympathetic to such a worldview).
The era where a city had more than one newspaper, radio station, etc., and there was a real competition and incentive for strong news reporting, investigative reporting, and just generally providing as much local and regional coverage as possible is over, and we are all the poorer for it.
