News deserts are fertile ground for partisan websites that give readers information through the lenses they prefer

"America’s growing news deserts have become vulnerable to wealthy partisans setting up local news outlets to push their political agendas. This has raised concerns about one-sided, politically-motivated narratives being strong-armed into local political discourse," Jem Bartholomew and Dhrumil Mehta of Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, report for Columbia Journalism Review. 

Their story is about Wyoming and a conservative news outlet called Cowboy State Daily, which started in 2019 and hired some journalists with good reputations, but "from the start the outlet’s political agenda seemed heavily weighted in one direction," CJR reports. "Cowboy State Daily’s energy reporting has appeared to throw doubt on the reality of man-made climate change, which is the consensus among the global scientific community." CJR found a similar bias on transgender issues.

"In Wyoming, the heightened importance of trans issues and other culture war topics (banning books, curtailing abortion rights) in the legislature follows a change in the state’s political strand of Republicanism. Former Casper Star-Tribune reporter Nick Reynolds, now senior politics reporter at Newsweek, told CJR, “There was this real libertarian ethic”—a belief the state should keep out of most issues—“that is starting to disappear” In its place is "a more state-interventionist conservatism, through which populist politicians are wielding governmental power to take on 'wokeness' by outlawing books and banning abortion and gender affirmation surgery," CJR reports.

"There are concerns declining standards of local journalism will have implications for the health of democracy," Bartholomew and Mehta write. Their story is bookended by comments from Matt Copeland, chief executive and editor of the nonprofit newsroom WyoFile: “You can see it time and time again around the globe, and certainly here in the U.S., that less savory information is going to flood in to fill that vacuum” making it “difficult for folks to participate in civic life in a fully-informed way,” he said. CJR reports, "When WyoFile was founded, in 2009, it arrived as an outlet dedicated to enterprise reporting that topped-up the important daily news of Wyoming’s legacy papers. Back then, 'We were maybe providing the protein to the carbs and dessert' of other media offerings, he said. Today, 'We’re the protein and the leafy greens and the whole grains—and increasingly the rest of the landscape is doing more of [just] the dessert.'

"In this sense, Wyoming’s experience—declining local news, a vacuum of good information, a mega-rich partisan setting up a news outlet that has pushed anti-trans views and climate misinformation—is an alarm bell for the rest of America. If local news cannot find a route to sustainability, actors with cash and questionable motives are free to inject their talking points into the political bloodstream. It’s a warning for where we’re heading as news deserts take hold."