Thomas Jefferson said in 1807 about newspapers: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”

Nothing much has changed in 200+ years, we reckon.

Newspapers, and their online versions today, seem to do better when they are owned and operated by local people who live in their areas of circulation. Ignoring the mega-monsters like Gannett and Paxton, even fairly small chains of news media seem to behave more and more as arms of the government and the political activists that dominate national and State politics. When coupled with the continued decline from internet and broadcast media competition, this harbors anything but ill for a fair, not just free, press. And more and more local, small-town and rural papers are just plain disappearing.

The same thing applies to even regional chains of radio and television: something which actually began decades ago.

(As early as the 1960s, most of rural and frontier Kansas was served by monopolistic TV stations belonging to the Kansas State Network. Which has now been gobbled up by a national firm.) And of course, truly independent stations have always been few and far between: NBC, ABC, and CBS for radio and television, together with Mutual (MBS, later Westwood One) as the big four radio. (And Fox, of course, is now as ubiquitous as the Big Three.) This was before, of course, NPR/PBS and PRI really got going with massive direct government subsidies and “commercial-free” (despite minutes of “sponsorship messages” each hour). (But keep in mind that many commercial radio stations also get government largess through public service announcements and other advertising revenues.) But consolidation of ownership has even a greater impact: iHeartMedia, for example, owns 860 live broadcast stations in 160 markets. Other chains including Nexstar Media (197 TV stations), Sinclair Broadcast (193), and many more. They cross over a variety of formats (talk, sports, music, etc.) and network affiliations.

The result? More and more cookie cutter, monologue broadcasting – especially when it comes to editorial content (opinion). Not all is so-called liberal or progressive, of course. Conservative (neo-con, admittedly) voices dominate talk radio. What is lost, all too often, even in loose, decentralized management of the chains, is local content and control. And the ability to do anything more than parrot whatever press releases governments and companies give them. But even in those stations that belong to companies that allow “independent” decisions as to content, it would appear that sometimes the orders to push (or block) certain things comes from on high.)

And of course, many of the music stations provide virtually no news at all except weather and traffic a couple of times an hour, and maybe 30 seconds of headlines each hour. But they, like everyone else, have lots of political advertisements, and often celebrities are heard pushing their own views: however biased or spontaneous those are.  But good analysis and honest news reports, especially of local matters, is absent.

The more regional and national levels of ownership of media, the more the ill effects: a concentration of power to shape public opinion and influence politicians; promoting their own bias; censorship (private, not “public”); homogenized content; and more.

The result? Loss of informed people who can make vital decisions for themselves because they have the facts. This is the bottom line.