New Report Unpacks the Crises Facing American Journalism and Offers Solutions

Journalism in the United States is in crisis: local newspapers are shuttering at an alarming rate, large cities that were once served by multiple daily local newspapers now barely sustain one or two major outlets, and the government has made concentrated attacks against public media.

A new report from the Roosevelt Institute, co-authored by Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication, traces the roots of these crises and offers an evidence-based roadmap to rebuild public media.

“As we show in the report, our media institutions have become dangerously vulnerable to commercial pressure and political capture,” says Pickard, who co-wrote the report with Bilal Baydoun and Shahrzad Shams of the Roosevelt Institute. “The next chapter of democracy reform must treat our media system as a core infrastructure that makes democracy possible and requires protection from both state control and commercial capture.”

The key takeaways from the report are:

• The crisis facing American journalism is the predictable outcome of decades of corporate libertarian media policy that prioritized commercial logics over democracy.
• Four entrenched constraints—the erosion of the public interest, deregulation and self-regulation, chronic underinvestment in public media, and a diminished Press Clause—have structured the often invisible domain of US media policy.
• These constraints have produced cascading harms, including extreme ownership consolidation, a collapse of local news, dependence on dominant digital platforms, and declining public trust.
• A democratic media system is still possible, but it requires a new paradigm of public-interest media policy—one that rebuilds public media and treats journalism as vital democratic infrastructure.

Learn more about the report and read it in full at the Roosevelt Institute website.