This is a very good read about an important part of info war. Without a local newspaper to cover local content, and investigate local power brokers, corruption, how policy is impacting the region and community and so on… there is no authoritative news source to provide a check on local powers (police, politicians, etc)… this is bad for communities. Where it gets worse, particularly for info war, is that the authoritative news source becomes remote, whether a big national or an international paper. This makes the least informed newspaper as relevant as the most informed newspaper, that is, they are all equally ignorant of conditions in the communities where they are consumed.





News deserts are a national security threat. Local news provides a critical check against corruption, inform their audience on regional issues but also establish a baseline authority on credibility and create a geographical centric shared knowledge reality. This is crucial for ensuring cohesion and community identity. When this is lost, the small communal identities are lost. This makes society fragile as people searching for identity will not be able to turn to their community, but sill have to seek identity in larger national movements. People will identity less as “from Paradise, Ohio” and more with larger movements. The opportunities for radicalization are clear.





For info war there is a more pressing concern. When an impartial objective authority is removed and group’s are left to establish their own source of news and truth, a number of biases immediately spring into play. Firstly, social groups have social capital, social credit. This pecking order of authority means that news disseminated by a high ranking member of society has more credibility, carries more weight, than news from a low ranking member. So that is one bias, social capital as proxy for credibility and authenticity.





The second issue is that the volume of news source consumption is roughly that when all news is remote and sourced from ignorance, and the distribution is one article from each source… the buffet approach to news consumption is









This creates an opening for an authoritative news source. Sources, rather. State sponsored propaganda from a hostile country is treated on equal terms with independent operations.