Certainly, we need reporters who have physical access to people in Washington, DC. But why do you think the way beltway media operates today is optimal? I’d argue it’s actually quite pathological.
I think local reporters, from any county of any state, should be able to routinely go to and report from DC. This would probably have to be paid for with some combination of state, federal, and local taxes (and hopefully concessions from the federal government to let smaller towns/cities in). Yes, there would be “inefficiencies,” but of course the tradeoff is we have robust, trustworthy media.
In today’s news media market, only reporters working for big corporations can even afford to stay in and report from DC. In fact… that’s exactly the problem. These people really are deeply disconnected from beltway outsiders (99% of our population).
As a member of the general public capable of understanding even elementary school playground social dynamics, you’d honestly have to be pretty braindead to trust what comes out of a “news” system that operates this way.
Finally let’s address your assertion (without evidence or anecdotes) that “decentralized smaller media holding powerful entities to account hasn’t shown us that it works better.” Um, are you familiar with the American Revolution? Or French Revolution? Or Bolshevik? Do you think these people were recruiting, marketing, and communicating through centralized news channels? And to go only just a bit further back… you do realize that the printing press has barely been around for a fraction of human history, right?
We also didn’t have the internet in the past. The internet has basically been a death blow for the actual profitability of the big corporate news media orgs that we allowed to form from the 1870s-1980s. This handful of news mega-corporations we had then just can’t operate in a way any American would describe as “ethical,” and also earn a profit, in a world where the internet exists. Since then, the economic system that created them has pushed them to “consolidate for efficiency” and fall into ever-wealthier corporate hands.
I certainly can’t claim I know the solution to all this - decentralized media has issues that need addressing. But I don’t think that “double down on centralized media” is part of it. Centralized media is pretty well-understood as a primary tool of fascism - every tyrannical government in basically all of human history has been built upon it. I also don’t think “this org is too big to fail” has ever done much good for working people - just the wealthy. It’s preserved some 401Ks, but we also need to talk about the issues with that system, which is getting a bit far off topic.
Anyway, hope you don’t deem this “casual and lazy.” Curious about your response.
PS: It would be helpful to avoid using terms like “beltway media” that aren’t clearly defined in dictionaries, or universally understood. Instead, say “media from the DC metro area.”