Rhode Island Foundation President and CEO David Cicilline joined “Behind the Story” this week to discuss the future of journalism and survey results on how Rhode Islanders feel about local news.
David Cicilline, who served in the U.S. Congress, said he remembers a time when there were regional and Washington bureaus of The Providence Journal. Today, those no longer exist, and he said the shrinking of the industry has resulted in an erosion of civic health among Rhode Islanders.
The Rhode Island Foundation, which helps support “Behind the Story,” is leading a national initiative locally called Press Forward Rhode Island, which will provide grants to nonprofit and for-profit news organizations that come up with ideas for how to improve access to news, address information gaps and increase sustainability.
“I’ve watched this significant decline in the presence of local media,” Cicilline said. “You see news organizations just shrink or just go away completely. And the reason it’s particularly pernicious is because you think about the role journalists play in exposing corruption, mismanagement, bad decisions by those in local and state and federal government. And that’s important oversight and sometimes the only way the public learns about those things.”
Cicilline also talked about a recent survey Press Forward Rhode Island published showing 89% of Rhode Island respondents saying they still placed value on local news and trusted those news sources more than national organizations.
But the research also showed Rhode Islanders are concerned about misinformation, and nearly two-thirds of respondents said they felt like local news lacked diversity in viewpoints.
“The responsibility of journalists and news sources is to report facts and not to give you what you want to hear or to support your opinion, and to distinguish between stories that are facts and opinion pieces,” Cicilline said.
“But that’s where civics education matters,” he added. “Making sure people understand this is a place where you can go when you want to know what the facts are. And if you want opinions on something, go to the opinions page or go to the program that’s talking about opinions, not news, but really educating people about the differences between those two things.”
Later in the show, Dan and Eli discussed the “stories we wish we wrote,” including: