There’s no news like … There is no news.

“Lincoln, Lawrence, and Norman are among America’s most attractive cities, where the opportunity for social advancement provided by big state universities are sources of local pride. Like most of the big college towns in the middle of the country, they have the art shops, the bookstores, and the cafés that coastal people say they miss in American life. What they do not have is presence. If you watch the national news on television, you see two kinds of American places: the kind where things are happening, and the kind where things have already happened. CNN and Fox speculate about the present in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles (and during campaign season, in ‘battleground’ or swing states like Iowa and Ohio). Everywhere else in the country, things do happen, but always without warning—and rarely with anyone to witness them. Now that the local newspaper is all but dead, there are few sources of news in the traditional sense. Television is best suited to the transmission of images of things that have already happened. So if a levy breaks or a bridge is destroyed, a news team might fly in, but it reports not in the here-and-now but in the hereafter.

“We should have bailed out the newspapers back in 2008: it would have cost a tiny fraction of what we spent on bailing out the banks. But since this opportunity was missed, only this fantasy remains: what if, to legally describe themselves as news channels, our national television carriers had to post a correspondent and a production team in all fifty states, and devote a certain amount of their air time to stories generated by these crews? What if CNN and Fox had employees who actually prepared for things that might happen and ran segments about what they like to call ‘developing stories’ throughout the United States of America? What if Fox and CNN anchors, in other words, had to be as well briefed as the crews that cover college football for ESPN? The sportscasters actually go places, read reports, and have informed opinions about the present. As a result, sports is the only arena where the whole country still exists in anticipation, week by week, on more or less equal terms.”

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/oct/27/land-of-news/

(And that would mean a more informed citizenry and, through a logic not explained, demise of Tea Party ideas and more votes for Democrats.)