Newspapers serve as watchdogs for the public, and when they close, “findings indicate that [political] corruption significantly increases,” according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This study also found that partisan online outlets were not doing enough to make up for the lack of news. About a third of the country's newspapers have closed, and almost two-thirds of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated since 2005, according to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative. The loss of newspapers and journalists has created so-called news deserts, areas where communities have no local news source. There are currently 204 U.S. counties without access to any kind of local news, according to the Northwestern study.
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