What does it take for a democracy to succeed?
It is a important query as we strategy the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence within the face of a constitutional crisis.*
Greater than something, a profitable democracy will depend on knowledgeable residents. To responsibly train our proper to vote, we’d like correct details about the problems of the day, from economics to schooling to the setting.
We additionally have to know the place candidates stand on the problems, and the way the end result of our votes will impression our communities.
Since its founding, the League of Girls Voters has devoted itself to educating voters. Our nonpartisan candidate boards, now underway throughout the state because the primaries strategy, are an ideal instance. The boards have been a trusted group useful resource for many years.
However lengthy earlier than the League got here into being — in actual fact, earlier than the US got here into being — Individuals relied on newspapers as their info lifeline. The League believes we can’t have fun our nation’s 250th birthday with out additionally acknowledging the significance, the very necessity, of the free press.
In 1776, America had about 40 newspapers — the “mass media” of the time. Their print runs totaled 600 or so, however many extra folks benefited as they heard the contents learn aloud in public squares.
Pamphlets had been one other key information supply: Thomas Paine’s well-known Widespread Sense had the biggest circulation of any guide in American historical past, in proportion to the inhabitants.
The Declaration of Independence made its means into Philadelphians’ arms courtesy of the Pennsylvania Night Submit. And newspapers were pivotal in constructing and sustaining assist for the Revolution.
“In establishing American independence, the pen and the press had advantage equal to that of the sword,” wrote David Ramsay, a historian of the time.
The founders acknowledged this once they sat down to jot down the U.S. Structure. The First Modification reads: “Congress shall make no regulation … abridging the liberty of speech, or of the press.”
In fact, American journalism has modified dramatically since. Print and broadcast information retailers proliferated within the 20th century, and social media within the 21st.
However native information reporting has declined sharply in recent times. Quite a few research inform us the U.S. has misplaced greater than 3,400 newspapers and 75% of newsroom jobs within the final 20 years. Greater than 200 U.S. counties at the moment are thought-about “information deserts.”
In reality, most Individuals now stay in communities which are severely under-covered by native information retailers, in accordance with a sobering report simply launched in mid-June by the nonprofit Rebuild Native Information and the media database Muck Rack. Particularly, their Local Journalist Index 2026 discovered that reporting about key civic points, together with healthcare and schooling, falls brief in favor of extra sensationalist crime information.
4 years in the past, the League in Washington accomplished an extensive study of how the lack of native journalism chips away at our democracy within the type of decreased voter participation, much less group involvement, greater authorities prices and larger political polarization.
Due to this examine, the League — at each the state and nationwide ranges — has adopted public coverage positions in assist of native information. Our positions don’t name on authorities to pay for rebuilding the information ecosystem, however merely to make sure circumstances exist that permit information to outlive.
Since our founding 106 years in the past, the League has championed the schooling of voters. A part of that effort requires a free and unbiased press to supply us with information that allow us to carry our leaders accountable.
I hope you’ll be a part of us in celebrating and supporting the work of your native information retailers, as we enter our subsequent 250 years. Subscribe, learn, share, talk about, remark — and, in fact, vote.
*Management of the nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Girls Voters of the US introduced on April 17, 2025, that the Trump administration’s disregard for congressional authority and governmental checks and balances and defiance of Supreme Court docket orders associated to the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the US had plunged the nation right into a constitutional disaster.
