Joyce McClure, Bridge2Blue
I wasn’t thinking about America’s changing media landscape. I was simply trying to create a Facebook page for Bridge2Blue.
Within hours, my screen looked nothing like it had the day before. Facebook began recommending posts from far-right websites I had never heard of. Some of our own posts attracted waves of hostile comments from people who clearly weren’t interested in a conversation. I deleted the unwanted material, adjusted the settings and moved on.
But for a brief moment, I had stepped into another online world.
What surprised me wasn’t simply the opinions. It was the assumptions. The heroes were different. The villains were different. The crises were different. It felt as though I had crossed an invisible border without leaving my desk.
We often describe these online worlds as “echo chambers.” That’s partly true. But what worries me most isn’t the echo. It’s the silence—the important stories that never reach us in the first place.
That experience left me wondering how often all of us are living inside personalized versions of reality. I’ve watched that transformation unfold over a lifetime.
As a child, I read the local newspaper where my father was often quoted as the city manager or my mother’s activities with the garden club were featured in photos. Long before I understood politics, I learned that local government mattered because it affected real people and real communities.
Later, my career in public relations, followed by years as a columnist, editor and freelance writer, taught me how powerfully information shapes public understanding. Never have I seen a change as profound as this one.
It’s not simply that newspapers gave way to websites or television gave way to smartphones. It’s that we no longer begin our conversations from the same place. There was a time when much of America began the day with the same front page. The local newspaper landed on the driveway before breakfast delivered by a kid on a bicycle. At work, neighbors discussed stories they had all read. In the evening, millions tuned in to ABC, CBS or NBC. Those news sources weren’t perfect. But they gave us something increasingly rare—a shared starting point.
Today, each of us carries a personalized front page in our pocket. Social media, cable television, podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters and websites allow us to build an information diet unlike anything previous generations could have imagined. The choices are almost limitless. And that’s both the promise—and the problem.
We spend a great deal of time talking about misinformation. But I wonder whether the larger problem is missing information. You don’t have to tell someone something false to shape how they see the world. You simply have to make sure they rarely encounter the rest of the story.
Years ago, accidental learning happened every day. Someone reading the sports section still saw stories about the school board, business, agriculture, and foreign affairs. Someone watching the weather also heard about Congress, Virginia politics, and world events.
Today, our information arrives pre-sorted, increasingly reflecting what we already believe or find emotionally satisfying. At the same time, something else has quietly disappeared – local journalism. Across the country, nearly 1,800 newspapers have closed since 2004, leaving roughly 50 million Americans living in communities with only one—or no—local news source.
Virginia has not escaped the trend. More than 40 newspapers have closed over the past 15 years. Between 2023 and 2025, the number of Virginia communities considered “news deserts” more than doubled. Today, nearly half of the Commonwealth’s cities and counties rely on a single local news outlet—or none at all. Those aren’t just statistics about newspapers. They’re statistics about communities.
For generations, local reporters attended school board meetings, county supervisor meetings, and city council debates so the rest of us didn’t have to. They explained why taxes increased, why roads were delayed, why schools changed, and why local businesses mattered. Many of those reporters are gone. The stories are disappearing with them. The vacuum has been filled by an endless stream of national political conflict.
Many Virginians can tell you what happened in Washington yesterday. Far fewer can tell you what happened at last week’s county board meeting or what legislation is moving through the General Assembly.
Trust in journalism has also become a political battleground. President Trump has repeatedly attacked news organizations and reporters who ask difficult questions, while some media companies have appeared increasingly reluctant to challenge political power. Whether those concerns come from the left or the right, the result is the same: public trust has become harder to earn and easier to lose.
Ironically, we have never had access to more information. Outstanding journalism is available from national organizations, nonprofit newsrooms, independent writers, and local digital publications. Yet greater access has not necessarily produced greater understanding. Instead of one imperfect front page, we now have millions of personalized ones. The old gatekeepers—newspaper editors and television producers—have largely been replaced by algorithms.
Editors certainly had biases. Algorithms have objectives. Their objective isn’t civic education. It’s engagement. Those aren’t the same thing.
We aren’t going back to the days when a newspaper landed on every driveway before breakfast. Perhaps that means the responsibility has shifted. It no longer belongs primarily to editors. It belongs to each of us. Not to agree. Not to abandon our values. But to recognize that none of us is seeing the whole picture.
The next time we’re tempted to dismiss a neighbor’s opinion as uninformed, perhaps we should ask ourselves a different question: If my understanding of Virginia came only from the news I consumed this week, what important stories might I have missed?
The answer is almost certainly different for every one of us. And perhaps that’s the most important story of all.
