Can nonprofits or government policies shrink local 'news deserts' across America?

This Memo is about the news biz, not our special corner of it — the religion-news biz.

Here’s the theme: America’s alarming decline of journalists and journalistic outlets from coast to coast endangers a functioning democracy at a time of political polarization, and lack of trust in central institutions that includes a low point in public regard for the news media.

One major aspect of this dire situation is dramatized in the November 15 release of the fifth report by the State of Local News Project, commendably operated by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with support from key media foundations.

“Many news organizations are hanging on by a thread,” this report says.

Much can be said about the failings of the old mainstream media, or of this or that news organization, or of a particular story — and should be said. Solid criticism is fair game.

But something very fundamental to the republic is occurring in the 21st Century.

Washington politics will always get lots of coverage, and likewise for national-level treatment of other subjects that newspaper executives value, such as business, entertainment and sports. The crisis comes with information at the state and local level. The Medill report, focused on local rather than state-level journalism problems, documents the following geography of “news deserts” where coverage is iffy or even non-existent.

Out of the nation’s 3,144 counties, 1,562 have only one surviving source for local news in any format, whether print, digital or broadcast, usually a weekly newspaper. Of these counties, 228 are on Medill’s Watch List, signifying “high risk” that the one existing outlet will die.

Then there are 204 counties without a single local journalistic shop.

Lots of news stories linked to this one: Does modern science rule out religious faith?

THE QUESTION above, in the headline, and current developments depicted below, involve skeptics’ long-running assertion that modern science makes religion outmoded and it should be discarded as irrational.

Is faith still credible in our scientific age? How do devout scientists view this supposed “war” between science and religion?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Gary Saul Morson, a Russia expert at Northwestern University, offers an important analysis of why the purportedly “scientific” — and horridly bloodthirsty — Soviet regime worked zealously to exterminate all religion (see the October issue of Commentary Magazine). But here The Guy will bypass political atheism’s track record.

Nor will this item survey the continual scientific and anecdotal evidence that religious involvement fosters physical and emotional well-being and positive life outcomes. Philosophy professor Stephen Asma, for one, hails these benefits even though he’s an agnostic bordering on atheism (see “Religion Q & A” for August 11).

Instead, The Guy focuses first on new research by British scholars Michael Buhrmester at the University of Oxford, Jonathan Lanman at Queen’s University, Lois Lee at the University of Kent, Valerie van Mulukom at Coventry University, and Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe at the University of York.

Lee, who studies why youths become atheists, says non-believers usually think this results strictly from rational inquiry. But “science increasingly shows that atheists are no more rational than theists,” and thinking otherwise is unscientific — indeed “irrational”! She finds that people on both sides of the God divide are shaped similarly by environmental influences like group-think, charismatic individuals, and how their parents raised them.

Atheistic parents pass on their outlook like religious believers do, more through shared culture than rational arguments, she reports. Non-religious parents often say children should choose for themselves but inevitably convey attitudes about religion. Not surprisingly, 95 percent of children from atheistic homes “choose” atheism.