All News is Local

"All News is Local" is one of those cliches that just happens to be true. On Thursday, August 22nd, Rachel Maddow took her show to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. For a few days now, Maddow has been showing how the local election board there is just one cog in the North Carolina Republican campaign to restrict access to voting. In her typical way, she shows just how wrong-headed this is, from a common sense perspective, from a government policy/spending perspective, and from the perspective of anyone who believes in democracy. The HuffPo did a nice write-up here.

Usually, the networks and cable-nets send their anchors out for the big, splashy disaster, trial, or crime story that will evolve over days. This is the first time I've seen one deploy for what is, essentially, a process story about a process that is "over." The vote already took place; Maddow played the YouTube video of the meeting.

The other interesting thing here is that Maddow heaped praise on the newspaper industry. It is no new thing for television people to interview newspaper people about stories: in some sad way, that substitutes when television doesn't bother to assign one of its own journalists to a story. Maddow not only interviewed that local newspaper journalist in North Carolina, but she asked, pleaded her viewers to support "local journalism" by subscribing to newspapers and paying to access internet paywalls. (You can bet you won't see the anchors on the broadcast networks pitching local newspapers over the air supplied by local television stations with local newsrooms.)