...Americans benefit when powerful institutions and important issues in their lives are scrutinized by good reporters on their behalf. Yet this kind of ambitious local news coverage by commercial media has diminished in community after community in recent years.
Recognizing that, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the government-created nonprofit institution that distributes federal dollars to public television and radio stations — have begun helping public radio stations do a better job of news reporting in their communities. CPB is funding Local Journalism Centersthat will enable dozens of public radio and television stations to work together in seven regions of the country to produce in-depth coverage of such subjects as education and the impact of the Gulf oil spill in southern states and coastal cities, economic change in the upper Midwest and Upstate New York, health care in central Florida, the environment in the Pacific Northwest, immigration and cultural change in southwestern cities, and evolving agribusiness in Great Plains communities.
NPR is working with local member stations on similar initiatives, including investigative reporting, as well as digital content sharing and Web site development that help stations stretch their limited resources. NPR also intends to begin a multiyear experimental partnership with selected member stations to cover the impact of state government actions in each of the 50 states, after many newspapers cut or closed their state capital news bureaus. Some individual stations are collaborating with nearby stations and new nonprofit news organizations to provide more local news to listeners.
And that's just part of the reasons we need NPR, locally and nationally. How can we protect ourselves if we don't know what's going on? It's as I said here earlier, if we don't have NPR, who's going to watch over government and corporations and report back to us what they do together, out of our sight?
It surely isn't going to be Fox "News".
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