Salena Zito of the New York Post has probably not yet heard about The Tennessee Star.
But in Thursday’s column titled “Why All Your News Now Comes With a Heap of Condescension,” she explained perfectly why The Tennessee Star will soon win the local media battle in the Volunteer State:
Used to be that you consumed your news from a local reporter who lived in your community and covered events from a perspective you recognized. Today, as more and more local newspapers die, that relationship has evaporated.
And folks are going to be less trusting of a reporter who works and lives in a cosmopolitan culture that has no connection with them. There’s no social consequence or contract because reporters and readers don’t have much in common.
And politics reflects the culture, so pols increasingly retreat to the “safe spaces” of their preferred national media organizations.
“Coverage of Trump is often treated as a proxy for how the press thinks of Trump’s supporters. That might be unfair to national reporters chasing down a controversial president. But the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that far too many Americans don’t have a local press that understands them, and thus all their news comes with a heap of condescension,” Zito writes, adding:
Reporters don’t like it when these voters talk down “the media,” as if they’re all part of one monolithic blob. But to those who used to have local news and reporters who lived among them, that’s precisely what the national press is.
Reporters, then, must invert the classic environmentalist trope of “Think globally, act locally.” At the very least, to bridge the yawning trust gap, journalists — even those who act globally — should think locally.
Unlike the well-known, long in the tooth, left wing “fake news” organization operating in Middle Tennessee, headquartered in the Washington, D.C., and staffed by reporters from the East and Midwest, The Tennessee Star is owned, operated, and staffed by Tennesseans who have lived in this community for decades.
Most Middle Tennesseans who live and work here are sick and tired of being condescended to by that other organization which views us locals with a sense of elite superiority of the sort found only in recent arrivals who never venture beyond the boundaries of Davidson County.
They know that at The Tennessee Star they will get fact based reporting on the issues that matter to them.
Mark our words.
It won’t be long before The Tennessee Star is larger and more successful than that past-its-expiration date liberal publication in town kept afloat by Fortune 500 advertisers dragged in by its corporate parent and the diminishing group of local advertisers who have not yet completely figured out that the people in Middle Tennessee with purchasing power are rapidly turning to a new and far superior source of news.
