Despite Attacks, the BBC Offers a Newsgathering Model that Spurns the Death of Truth. The U.S. Could Do Worse.
A Santa Barbara expat journalist reflects on the need for a vast expansion of independent reporting -- especially in local communities -- as a time when disinformation and corruption keep spreading.
By Barney McManigal
London
President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC is his latest attempt to target the press for the offense of doing its job, holding power to account.
Rather than seek a correction for journalism he doesn’t like, Trump has already filed massive defamation claims against the Wall Street Journal ($10 billion), New York Times ($15 billion), and others. These lawsuits inhibit journalists everywhere, by eroding freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, but they aren’t the only challenge Trump poses for American news gathering.
Trump’s sprawling agenda is creating a huge need for impartial investigators.
This includes his family’s multi-billion dollar investments in social media and crypto-currencies, but also Trump’s slashing the federal workforce and budget; his pardons for rich criminals; and, his firing of two dozen inspectors general, the watchdogs inside agencies—among many other examples.
But the growing need for journalists arrives at a perilous time—with the press in a severely weakened state.
In the last three decades, behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have acquired a larger and larger share of advertising revenues—and eliminated thousands of journalism jobs that relied on them. U.S. newspapers have lost, by some accounts, up to 80 percent of their staffs. More than a third have shuttered completely.
As a result, we face a shortfall of beat reporters to investigate potential conflicts of interest, corruption, and mismanagement.
The need for local news. Local news has suffered most.
National outlets have slashed roles at newspapers, magazines, and thanks to Trump, also at public broadcasters like PBS and NPR; still, we still have working professionals in hubs like Washington and New York.
Similarly, at the regional level, newspapers in many major cities struggle to print seven days a week, but they still employ reporters in newsrooms. But at the local level, where 3,000 print outlets have disappeared since 2005—most without a digital replacement—news is increasingly on life support.
So when ICE sweeps through blue states, I wonder what happened to residents who lacked appropriate documentation. I wonder how cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, national parks, and other services will impact communities. I wonder whether National Guard deployments in cities—which led to violence, even before the extra-judicial killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis —respected peoples’ First Amendment and due process rights.
Many communities across the country lack the reporting capacity to tell us.
Beat reporters cost money. At the same time, “news deserts,” or places without local reporting resources, are expanding. Nearly half of all 3,244 U.S. counties have only one news source—and 206 have none.
A U.S. BBC? As a journalist and social scientist, I have been thinking about the impact of journalism loss, with a simple aim: If we can describe the value of independent, impartial investigators, then we can make the case for funding more reporters to track our most pressing stories.
My hometown of Santa Barbara provides a useful example.
Its handful of reporters exceeds that of many other places, and they do an excellent job with existing resources. But the area needs more journalists to report on government, business, housing, the environment, and now instability prompted by Trump’s agenda.
In the 2000s, when I was a reporter at the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily Santa Barbara News-Press, we had close to 60 journalists—30 reporters—covering all aspects of community life. But in 2023 the much-shrunken paper shuttered after 155 years.
Without a daily, the area has lost 100 percent of its single-beat reporters: journalists who have the time and freedom to go deep on one subject. Reflecting market realities everywhere, many important stories now go uncovered.
“Our community is muddling along,” one longtime Santa Barbara journalist, who requested anonymity, told me during a recent return visit. Around the same time, a local industry lobbyist explained that pesky reporters are largely a thing of the past. “It’s actually great for clients because they’re kind of like elephants in the room,” said the lobbyist, who required anonymity to discuss business. “There isn’t much going on.”
But Santa Barbara has always cared about its news. Although the News-Press shuttered in 2023, it declined dramatically after 2006, when billionaire owner Wendy McCaw famously intervened in the paper’s news content, triggering the first mass resignation in American journalism. Within a few years, nearly all of my colleagues departed, some dismissed following a nascent unionization drive, which McCaw strongly opposed.
The News-Press controversy, a twisting drama captured in the acclaimed documentary Citizen McCaw, turns 20 next July. McCaw, whom the National Labor Relations Board and courts ruled must pay more than $3.5 million to former staff for labor law violations nearly two decades ago, declared bankruptcy in what critics described as an attempt to block payment. The matter remains tied up in court.
Today, my hometown still hungers for news—and is seeing green shoots of experimentation. A non-profit venture called Newswell, has re-launched the News-Press online, after philanthropists acquired the paper’s domain name. This could add a handful of beat reporters to work alongside trusted outlets, including the Independent, and Noozhawk.
It’s a positive step that might restore some—but not all—of the journalism Santa Barbara lost. Other communities that still produce good journalism have seen similar innovations.
Despite losses, SB still an outlier. But not every place is so fortunate. Therefore, we need to keep thinking big, and explore ways to expand journalism everywhere—and at the local, regional and national levels.
In Britain, where I landed after the News-Press controversy (and where many Yanks gravitated after Trump’s re-election), the taxpayer-funded BBC, with its thousands of journalists, remains a last line of defense.
Trump’s threat aside, Britain’s “Auntie” faces perennial challenge from foes trying to defund it. (Far-right Reform Party Leader Nigel Farage—currently beating the ruling Labour party in polls—has already threatened cuts.).
Yet somehow the “Beeb” survives. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy recently deemed it one of the country’s most important institutions: “If we didn’t have it right now in this era of toxic populism, we would have to invent it.”
It’s time to apply the same thinking across the pond.
We need to invent a similar institution in America—or at least start talking about it. It’s hard to imagine at a time when misinformation thrives, and trust in institutions has plummeted. But America needs a bulwark of accurate and impartial news gathering everywhere—now more than ever with Trump.\
Barney McManigal is an American journalist and social scientist living in Britain. A veteran of multiple news organizations, including the Santa Barbara News-Press, he is currently based at the University of Oxford, where he has taught political science, and works with public health researchers estimating global antibiotic resistance.