Read Chapter 4 in Anatomy of Fake News by Nolan Higdon.

3 keywords
4 quotes central to Higdon's thesis and argument in Chapter 4.
What factors have contributed to the creation of US news deserts?
What is your local newspaper? Does the town you grew up in still have a local newspaper?
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/5/9/13771462/news-deserts-explained
https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/
https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/news-deserts-and-ghost-newspapers-will-local-news-sur
vive/
https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/states/california/

Keywords:
False flag- a hostile attack that obscures the identity of the penetrator/ affiliation
Regime- an authoritarian government or a set of rules
Propaganda machine- is a dominant force that organizes people to construct and spread
messages that control, influence, and fear human behavior and attitudes

The author mentions the propaganda machine many times in the text to show how much power it
holds. Propaganda machines were only meant to increase troops for the Cold War but became a
main component for nation-states afterward.

Quotes:

“A propaganda is most effective when it saturates communication, leaving little to no space for
contrary facts or evidence”. Many war leaders used propaganda to control their regimes. Fake
news also served to cover up war losses and failures. For example, the Nazis constructed
narratives of the German heroism and triumph. They also spread fake news into the enemy’s
territory to mislead and create instability.

On the latter, “much of the fake news was a distraction from the contradiction of combating a
hateful regime while practicing hate at home”. Individuals were jailed or beaten if they
challenged the regime. “The use of fake news as a distraction from and an outright denial of
disturbing realities”
“Whether it be INFECTION or Mockingbird, false flags or dubious reporting, fake news has
been an influential weapon in global conflicts sparing world wars and regime change”.

Thoughts:
In Santa Clara County, there are 17 ongoing newspapers and all but one news source uploads
weekly. I usually get my news source from Mercury News because the site is always up-to-date
since it is up daily. News deserts have been occurring due to multiple factors. One, COVID-19,
has been shutting down dozens of local newspaper businesses. According to Hasan Minhaj, 30
local newspapers have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the coronavirus, more
than 2000 newspapers were shut down. Newspaper revenues have dropped more than 57% since
2004. The second cause is the rapid decrease in print readers, which speaks to why print
newspapers are running low in stock. The site, “usnewsdeserts.com”, states that there are not
enough print readers to support print newspapers, plus, almost everything is run on online media
now. There are so many different mediums of news that print newspapers are dismissed by
consumers, which is another factor in news deserts. Online news travels way faster to consumers
than physical print news. Then again, the amount of fake news and mistrustful information
circling every day is horrifying as well. No one knows how to distinguish fake news from real
news anymore “when the sources offering real news aren’t trusted” (VanDerWerff). The media
firms only care about quick revenue, making money as fast and as much as possible so when
they feed irrelevant news to consumers, these firms could care less.