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How news impacts democracy per USD Communications Professor Nik Usher

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This discusses a 2025-06-08 interview with University of San Diego Communications Professor Nik Usher[1] about their research on how news impacts democracy. The podcast is released 2025-06-14 to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show[2] syndicated for the Pacifica Radio[3] Network of over 200 community radio stations.[4]
It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources[5] and treating others with respect.[6]
Interview with University of San Diego communications professor Nik Usher about how news impacts public health, second draft of history, illiberal politics, and prosecutions for corruption.
29:00 mm:ss podcast from interview conducted 2025-06-12 of Nik Usher by Spencer Graves about how news impacts democracy

University of San Diego Communications Professor Nik Usher[1] discusses their research on how news impacts democracy. Recent publications describe how media impacted the response to Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, illiberal politics, and prosecutions for political corruption. This interview focuses especially on five of their recent publications:

  • (2022-01) "How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Local Journalism, News Non-profits, and Political Corruption" with Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell
  • (2022-07) "Journalism as historical repair work: addressing present injustice through the second draft of history"
  • (2023-02) "The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy"
  • (2023-05) "Localizing COVID-19 Public Health Department Outreach on Digital Platforms: The Role of Discoverability, Reach, and Moderation for Illinois’ COVID-19 Vaccination Rates", with 4 c-authors.
  • (2024) "Why News Organizations ‘Platform’ Illiberal Politics: Understanding News Production, Economic Insolvency, and Anti-Democratic Pressure Through CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall"

Professor Usher is also the author of three book:

  • (2014) Making News at The New York Times
  • (2016) Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code
  • (2021) News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism

co-author of another:

  • (2025) Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism with Jessica C. Hagman

and co-editor of another:

  • (2021) Journalism Research That Matters with Valerie Belair-Gagnon.

If journalism is to serve democracy ...

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Professor Usher noted that if journalism is to serve democracy, it must take a stand for democracy. Unfortunately, we are not seeing that today in part because journalism is under tremendous pressure, both economically and politically.

Professor Usher was asked about the distinction between accountability and access journalism, discussed in a recent interview in this series with Dean Starkman. Usher replied that access journalists sometimes think they are doing accountability journalism.

Graves noted, "You can defame poor people with impunity. But if you say something that might offend someone with power you've got to check your facts. That takes time. And even if you get it right, it might not be profitable."

Usher replied, "It's only recently that people have felt that they could push back on journalists. ... When I was a reporter ... my editors used to tell me, 'Don't listen to protesters. Go ask the police for a crowd estimate, because they have to assign the right number of officers. ... [But] the right number of officers may be deeply out of proportion with the people present, as we are seeing events unfold in Los Angeles."

Graves then asks about New York Times v. Sullivan and Trump's recent lawsuits against ABC and other news news outlets, adding that, "those lawsuits sound to me like thinly veiled requests for bribes." Professor Usher replied "I'm really careful about words like bribes, because in other countries bribes are the way that journalists live, because these organizations can't afford to pay them. ... There is literally like a brown envelope culture in places around the world because media isn't sustainable, and that's a really loaded word for me as a scholar. I don't think they're bribes. ... I think they are displays of power."

"How loud does the watchdog bark?"

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Professor Usher's research report with Kim-Leffingwell on "How loud does the watchdog bark" found that the presence of a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News was associated with an increase in the number of prosecutions for political corruption in US federal court jurisdictions between 2003 and 2019, but they found no impact on such prosecutions attributable to the number of journalists.[10]

This suggest that rule of law is improved by accountability journalism, which is more likely to be provided by members of the Institute for Nonprofit news than by more traditional media. However, it is far from obvious how to fund that. The traditional market for journalism will not support what seems to be needed. Philanthropy has all sorts of injustices, because too much of that money comes from rich people, which may distort public priorities. And reliance on tax money can be problematic, Professor Usher insists, especially if more of it goes to big institutions than smaller ones. It can further be a problem if it creates a news industry dependent on government money.

For work on how to fix these problems, Professor Usher recommends the work of the Open Markets Institute[11] and Free Press.

The need for media reform to improve democracy

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This article is part of category:Media reform to improve democracy. We describe here briefly the motivation for this series.

One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, “There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper.”[12] McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.[13]

At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which contributed to making the US a leader in the rate of growth in average annual income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita). Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.

That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.[14]

In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet.[15] This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence worldwide, threatening democracy itself.

The threat from loss of newspapers

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A previous Media & Democracy interview with Arizona State University accounting professor Roger White on "Local newspapers limit malfeasance" describes problems that increase as the quality and quantity of news declines and ownership and control of the media become more highly concentrated: Major media too often deflect the public's attention from political corruption enabled by poor media. This too often contributes to other problems like scapegoating immigrants and attacking Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while also facilitating increases in pollution, the cost of borrowing, political polarization and violence, and decreases in workplace safety. More on this is included in other interviews in this Media & Democracy series available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

An important quantitative analysis of the problems associated with deficiencies in news is Neff and Pickard (2024). They analyzed data on media funding and democracy in 33 countries. The US has been rated as a "flawed democracy" according to the Economist Democracy Index and spends substantially less per capita on media compared to the world's leading democracies in Scandinavia and Commonweath countries. They note that commercial media focus primarily on people with money, while publicly-funded media try harder to serve everyone. Public funding is more strongly correlated with democracy than private funding. This recommends increasing public funding for media as a means of strengthening democracy. See also "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

Good news

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The good news is that many local governments can fund local news nonprofits with a firewall to prevent political interference in the content at a rate comparable to what the US had in the first half of the nineteenth century and what leading democracies have today with 3 percent of their budget. That's less than what organizations in the US on average spend on accounting, advertising and public relations.[16]

Discussion

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[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources[5] and treating others with respect.[6]]

Notes

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Nik Usher, Wikidata Q134715348
  2. ↑ Media & Democracy, Director: Spencer Graves, Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q127839818{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  3. ↑ Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q2045587
  4. ↑ list of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates, Wikidata Q6593294
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 The rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources may not be enforced on other parts of Wikiversity. However, they can facilitate dialog between people with dramatically different beliefs
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Wikiversity asks contributors to assume good faith, similar to Wikipedia. The rule in Wikinews is different: Contributors there are asked to "Don't assume things; be skeptical about everything." That's wise. However, we should still treat others with respect while being skeptical.
  7. ↑ Burch (2025).
  8. ↑ Folkenflik (2025).
  9. ↑ Drenon (2025).
  10. ↑ Usher and Kim-Leffingwell (2022). Their Table 2 shows that the number of prosecutions increased by on average 1.4 per year during that period. Their Table 1 shows no impact on prosecutions due to the number of journalists, even though the number of journalists in the US fell by roughly a factor of 3 during that period, as documented in their Figure 2.
  11. ↑ Open Markets Institute, Wikidata Q98779260
  12. ↑ Tocqueville (1835, p. 93).
  13. ↑ McChesney and Nichols (2010, pp. 310-311, note 88).
  14. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015, p. 80).
  15. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015). See also Wikiversity, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” and “Category:Media reform to improve democracy“.
  16. ↑ See the section on "Sampling units / experimental polities" in the Wikiversity article on Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government, accessed 2025-10-15.

Bibliography

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