Where do you get your political news?

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article up about the nationalization of our news sources and the increasing partisanship and polarization of our politics.  In short, even the smallest of local issues is now examined through a national, partisan lens.

The article even gives a shout-out to the Fayetteville Observer:

Americans today are far more engaged with and knowledgeable about national politics than state or local politics, a gap that has been growing in recent decades. And it turns out that the changing media environment is a key engine of today’s nationalization. More and more, Americans are turning away from the media outlets that are most likely to provide a modicum of state or local coverage. They are substituting Fox News (or maybe FiveThirtyEight) for the Fayetteville Observer, and The New York Times’ website for the Nevada Appeal.

The article states that the rise of the internet has lead people away from traditional state and local news sources:

North of 70 percent of respondents indicated that they were regular newspaper readers as late as 1990, a figure that fell to the high 50s by 2014. The drop in those who reported watching local TV news is even steeper, from above 75 percent to below 50 percent. Over that same period, the share of people who reported getting news online more than tripled, from 15 percent to 46 percent.   And while in theory those citizens could be going to the websites of local news outlets, research has found that they emphatically are not, so the shift to online news has meant a shift away from local content, too. Americans are moving away from media outlets that are likely to have some state and local coverage and toward those that do not.

The article concludes with data showing a decline in voter turnout for state and local elections.  This is a bad thing, as these elections have the greatest impact on the policies that affect our daily lives.

I started Cross Creek Divide to fill a void I saw in political news and debate in this area and to address hyper-partisanship that is poisoning Fayetteville and North Carolina politics.

In a very direct way, this blog is a challenge to the national trend examined by FiveThirtyEight.  Thanks for reading.