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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I agree overall that this is not a good thing for also furthering a knowledge gap between rural and urban areas. But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio? Genuinely asking.

I tried looking for sources on station audience sizes, alternatives they might have, etc. But it was difficult to find.

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> But in the age of internet streaming, wouldn't rural areas still have access to stream public radio?

Sometimes streaming isn't an option. When Helene hit WNC we lost power, cell, internet, and water all at the same time. The local NPR stations were the only ones broadcasting updates on a regular cadence so we could learn what in the world was going on. And we're not far from downtown Asheville.

Some extremely rural areas only have spotty internet or no internet or cell at all and public radio is the only thing they have.

Local reporting is basically dead outside of metro areas.

Sure, you can stream, but the content will be focused on another locale or won't address local issues.

When I'm not busy worrying about everything else, I worry that there's assuredly an explosion of local corruption, especially outside of cities large enough to still have something resembling actual local news media, that we can't even begin to get a handle on because it's... well, it's invisible now, that's why it's (surely—I mean, we can't possibly think corruption is dropping or even remaining steady, with the death of the small town paper and small-market TV news rooms, right?) happening in the first place.

I think it's, quietly and slowly, the thing that's going to doom our country to decline if something else doesn't get us first (which, there are certainly some things giving this one a run for its money). The Internet killed a pillar of democracy, replaced it with nothing that serves the same role, and we didn't even try to keep it from happening, so here we are, we doomed ourselves by embracing the Internet quickly and not trying to mitigate any harm it causes.

For some your comment might sound even comic but it is damn true. It safens me that the dangerous spiral is not seen by many others.

After all, the milenia old adage "bread and games" silences to many.

It's pretty dead even in metro areas.

My local NPR broadcasts rarely actually cover anything that's happening in like city or county politics. Heck, even talking about state politics is pretty rare.

In the SF bay area, KQED (NPR affiliate) has a lot of coverage of local SF and Bay Area politics. The Pacifica station, KPFA (public radio but not an NPR affiliate) has more.

Yes, all the rural PBS markets will retain streaming access, which, again, is how most people under the age of 60 get access to PBS today.

Public radio and local broadcasting has been gobbled up by right-wing sources, including Sinclair

Watch this clip:

https://youtu.be/xwA4k0E51Oo?feature=shared

As a long time listener of AM radio. Literally nothing has changed from a programming perspective. The only noticeable difference is who supplies the on the hour news.

Well a counter argument would be, how would you know if anything is changed? If you're not part of the editors for a newsrooms how would you know which stories are cut and which make the broadcast?

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