A tiny provision of the act recently passed by the House gives local newsrooms a major tax break
The official summary of the Build Back Better Act, which just passed the House of Representatives, is startling in its understatement. It begins: “This bill provides funding, establishes programs, and otherwise modifies provisions relating to a broad array of areas, including education, labor, child care, health care, taxes, immigration, and the environment.” A broad array indeed: the law increases our investments in safe drinking water, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, public health infrastructure, housing and rental assistance, cybersecurity, tribal infrastructure, drought relief, wildfire prevention, small business aid, public transit, and veterans services, along with providing up to six semesters of free community college, free universal pre-K, expanded medical benefits for the poor, dental, hearing and vision care for seniors, reduced prices on pharmaceuticals, up to 12 weeks paid family leave and a path to permanent resident status for Dreamers.
Over time, this legislation, assuming it passes the Senate, will transform many lives and communities. But most Americans have no idea what’s in the Build Back Better Act, other than its overall price of about $2 trillion over ten years. That’s less than one third what we’re going to spend on the military, but most Americans probably don’t know that either. Big Tech, which was supposed to give us an “information superhighway,” has instead helped make Americans less informed and more distrustful of authoritative news sources. If you are worried that we’re living in a 21st century version of Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, join the club.
Which is why I’m most excited about one tiny provision of the Build Back Better Act that could go a long way toward improving what we actually do know about what government is doing. It’s a piece of legislation called the Local Journalism Sustainability Act that was rolled into the larger law thanks to the efforts of Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell and Ron Wyden and Republican Representative Dan Newhouse. It provides a hefty payroll tax credit to newsrooms that employ full-time local journalists, of up to $85,000 over five years per employee. This tax credit will provide a dramatic boost to local newsrooms. For example, Francis Draper, the publisher of the Afro-American in Baltimore, MD, estimates that it bring in about $90,000 per year, allowing her to add four editorial positions, which would double the size of her newsroom.
More and more Americans are living in news deserts, places that are served by one newspaper or less. About 1,800 communities have no news outlets at all, while thousands have papers with almost no local reporting. The number of news reporters in America has dropped 60 percent since 2000, a collapse that has been hastened by the rise of Big Tech platforms like Facebook and avaricious hedge funds buying old outlets and gutting their staffs. Steven Waldman, the co-founder of Report for America and one of the prime movers behind the Rebuild Local News Coalition, an alliance of more than 3,000 local outlets, points out, “The collapse of local news threatens each community’s ability to address education, COVID, health care, and the other problems they care most about. Without accurate local information, we’ll have more corruption, more misinformation, more waste, and more polarization.”
Most critically, the payroll tax credit is targeted to local newsrooms, which can be old-fashioned papers or TV stations or newfangled websites or newsletters. What is key is that the reporters supported by it have to be employed by news organizations whose “primary purpose…is to serve a local community by providing local news” and who are involved in “gathering, preparing, directing the recording of, producing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, presenting, or publishing original local community news for dissemination to the local community.”
Why does the decline and revival of local news matter so much? Because local news outlets play a central role in binding communities together. No other local civic institution — a mayor, a church, a sports team, even a library — acts as the memory and conscience of a community like a newspaper. No other organization can provide the same kind of check on power or give local citizens the cues they need to understand how the trends and forces shaping the larger world affect them in their personal lives.
Thomas Jefferson articulated this well in a letter he wrote to a delegate to the Continental Congress. He said,
“The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”
The original version of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act had two additional provisions, one that would subsidize local advertisers and one that would give individuals a $250 tax credit for subscriptions or donations to local news outlets. Still, even without those measures the law will pump as much as $5 billion into local news over the next five years. It’s a good beginning and a sign that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are awake to the threat of Idiocracy and trust that independent, local journalism is a public good worth fighting for.