California has a problem.<\/p>\n
–\u00a0MARK Z. BARABAK COLUMNIST<\/p>\n
THE Santa Barbara News-Press is one of the California newsrooms to close; a nonprofit is working to revive it.<\/p>\n
(MEL MELCON Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
It’s not homelessness, a lack of housing or the state’s increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at length.It’s truth decay.<\/p>\n
If you believe that information is the taproot of knowledge and expanding personal vistas is key to learning, there’s a case to be made that the great Golden State \u2014 quietly, with scant notice \u2014 is growing more impoverished by the day.<\/p>\n
In the last quarter of a century, a third of California newsrooms have closed.<\/p>\n
Nearly 7 in 10 journalists have lost their jobs.<\/p>\n
The relentlessly cruel economics of the news business, driven in good part by the voracious profiteering of monoliths such as Google and Facebook, has devastated the industry \u2014 including the newsroom that employs your friendly columnist \u2014 drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the rest of the country, vastly worse off.<\/p>\n
There’s an information vacuum and that space is filling up with garbage.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, the daily diet of \u201cnews\u201d that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely style themselves as prophets of the unvarnished truth.<\/p>\n
(If you genuinely can\u2019t differentiate between news and commentary, such as this, or between those making an honest attempt to present a fair, all-things-considered account of events versus someone shaving, eliding and shoehorning facts to fit a predetermined narrative, here\u2019s a suggestion: Save time, skip the rest of this column and turn to the sports or comics pages.)<\/p>\n
Not long ago, California took a baby step toward addressing this rampant decay.<\/p>\n
Now, even that tiny effort is tottering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California has a problem. –\u00a0MARK Z. BARABAK COLUMNIST THE Santa Barbara News-Press is one of the California newsrooms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[68254,68251,68258,68249,68248,68257,30425,68252,68245,68250,68244,68256,68246,68255,68253,68247,121,123,122],"class_list":["post-143272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-android-magazine","tag-best-magazine","tag-digital-magazines","tag-free-magazine","tag-free-magazines","tag-ipad-magazine","tag-magazine","tag-magazine-subscription","tag-magazines","tag-magazines-for-smartphones","tag-magzter","tag-online-digital-magazine","tag-online-magazine","tag-online-pdf-magazine","tag-pdf-for-smartphones","tag-pdf-magazine","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}