Jackson Jambalaya

Newspapers have long been the lifeblood of American democracy. They mattered before there was an America. Franklin was a printer. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay made their case for the Constitution in New York newspapers.

As America grew from thirteen states on the eastern seaboard into a continental nation of fifty, newspapers grew with it. By the middle of the last century, thousands of papers covered states, towns, and even small counties.

Their critical role is to let people at the state and local level see who exercised power in their name, and what they did with it. It is hard to imagine America becoming the democracy it did without them.

Yet that is precisely what we now face. Imagine America without local or state newspapers. You do not need to imagine it. Since 2005, more than 3,000 local newspapers have closed—around 40 percent of them. Here in Mississippi, Buckley Newspapers shut the Jasper County News and the Smith County Reformer in June 2024. The Reformer had published since 1889.

Advertising dollars moved to the big social media platforms. Local newspapers can no longer pay reporters to cover their own communities.

More of the content is generic. Less of it is truly local news.

Hollowed out, newspapers increasingly cover what local television is reporting, while television reports what local newspapers and radio already treat as relevant. The media landscape becomes an echo chamber. Into that echo chamber pours social media, where a provocative claim travels faster than a reported fact—and from there into conventional wisdom, and finally into public policy.

One consequence of having so few reporters cover so much is that what is presented as news is often just a press release. A public body meets, makes a series of interesting decisions, and reveals a great deal—and the press release says only what somebody wanted said about it. Without a local reporter sitting there, taking notes, how does the public really find out what public officials are up to? Budgets are set to spend your money without the public knowing what was spent, or on what. School boards vote on your children’s schooling with no parent in the room.

One attempt to address this has been to set up nonprofit media organizations. Mississippi has its fair share of them. They are often well-meaning, and the state is better off for them. But they tend to focus on what is happening statewide, not locally. Nonprofit outlets seldom sit through the Yazoo City Council or the Madison County School Board.

Worse, the nonprofit model can turn news into propaganda. Some of those pumping money into the Mississippi media landscape are doing so in order to create a narrative.

Who can forget the way one or two nonprofit outlets covered the Jackson water crisis a few years ago? Rather than give us the facts about a dysfunctional city government unable to maintain basic infrastructure, they used the story to feed an ideological narrative about Mississippi’s past and politics. I wish they had told us why our state capital did not have clean water.

News as narrative has done extraordinary damage to civic discourse in this country. It is, I am convinced, responsible for the coarsening of political debate.

So where do ordinary people go for accurate local news? Too much is presented through the prism of donor preferences. No wonder Americans often cannot agree on the facts. I could not see a solution. Until now.

The Mississippi Wire is a news wire, not a newspaper. It reports, verbatim, what public officials say. It does not take what they say and press it into a narrative. It covers public bodies across the state, from the legislature down to school boards.

It is different because it is only - or almost only - primary sourced. If we quote the governor or a local official, we tell you what they said. We do not lift it to suit an editor or a partisan campaign.

That fills the void the old newspapers left, and the one the nonprofits have not been able to fill: the granular detail of truly local stories. Rather than recycle what other outlets are already saying, the Wire gives new news.

Three examples from the past fortnight. Madison County supervisors valued each Amazon data center building at $292 million. Amazon says $70 million. Many millions of dollars of taxable value turns on who is right. Then there was the story about Jackson’s public works director, who told the council his roads budget is going from $22 million to $14 million, which sounds like even bigger potholes. Or a couple of days ago in Greenville, where a judge warned about some of the unintended consequences of the new youth court law.

The Wire lets you see what was decided, not the spin.

A great deal of the mistrust in officials, experts and reporters has been earned. And policing speech does not fix it - we saw that during Covid. But the answer to a false narrative was never to shout it down. It is to make the record available so that anyone can check it. The Wire does not ask to be believed. It shows you what was said and lets you judge.

You can read it at MississippiWire.News. We have designed it so anyone can access the RSS feed, and we actively want other media outlets to take it. The Wire does not need to out-shout the racket. It needs to be the thing the racket gets checked against.

We hope to set a standard for factual reporting: what officials in public bodies around the state say and decide, in their own words.

Honest reporting. We think there is a desperate need for it.

Douglas Carswell is President of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and author of this post.  

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy sponsored this post.