In this episode of "Democracy on Fire," Kay Brown speaks with veteran reporter Tom Belden, whose decades covering transportation and tourism provide a vantage point for examining the collapse of traditional newspapers, the rise of digital publishing, and the growth of nonprofit news organizations. Together they consider how smartphones, social media, and fragmented audiences have altered public understanding, often replacing shared facts with personalized information streams.

They conclude that media literacy is one urgent solution, arguing that citizens must actively evaluate sources rather than passively consume headlines. Belden highlights several nonprofit outlets he believes contribute meaningful reporting while reflecting on the economic pressures that reshaped the profession. Brown closes by emphasizing the press as an informal check on power and expressing concern about journalism’s responsibility in American democracy.

Key Takeaways:

• Media literacy education should begin early to help audiences distinguish reliable reporting from misinformation.
• Readers should consult multiple credible sources rather than rely exclusively on algorithm-driven feeds.
• Nonprofit journalism organizations are increasingly filling reporting gaps left by shrinking local newspapers.
• Economic incentives have significantly influenced the availability and quality of local news coverage.
• Audience fragmentation can contribute to political polarization and competing understandings of reality.
• Investigative reporting remains essential for accountability even as media institutions evolve.
• Consumers should actively evaluate sourcing, evidence, and editorial standards before accepting information as factual.

Links referenced in this episode:

• propublica.com
• thetrace.org
• insideclimatenews.org

Mentioned in this episode:

Leigh McGowan UAN Promo Stinger - Short -[2026]

The Path to the U.S. Senate Runs Through Alaska (Promo)

Welcome to Democracy on Fire. Freedom of the press, so important to our democracy, is under attack by our government.

At the highest level, Donald Trump is trying to get his hands on any news source that he can get his billionaire friends to buy. They've already acquired major sources like CBS News, Twitter, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and of course Fox Fox News.

And they're using them to block negative media and serve Trump and his interests.

And not to mention, we've seen attacks on public media defunding of it, NPR and pbs, and he's even barred news outlets that don't bow to his pro Trump sentiments from the Pentagon's press office. At an individual level, journalists are being detained and assaulted while covering protests and demonstrations.

We saw the example of photographer John Abernathy, who was forcefully detained, knocked to the ground and pepper sprayed by federal agents outside an ICE detention facility near Minneapolis. And and it isn't just John.

Journalists from all around the nation are under siege for reporting negatively on the federal government's actions, with high level officials targeting them with investigations and defamation claims. And further, Trump has leveraged his power to pull shows off the air if they spoke against him.

Like we saw with Stephen Colbert's the Late show, it's clear that Trump and high level government officials are attempting to silence any media that doesn't serve them. And it's becoming increasingly hard for people to sort through the massive amounts of misinformation and find the truth.

In today's episode of Democracy on Fire, I sit down with Tom Bilden, an American journalist, to talk about attacks on free media fueling Trump's war on democracy and how we get and consume the news in this evolving media environment. Tom was a working American journalist for 45 years.

He spent the last three decades of his career as a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, primarily covering transportation and tourism.

Now retired, he devotes his time to providing financial support to some of the thousands of nonprofit news organizations and websites that are helping to fill the void left by the collapse of traditional news sources. He's a graduate of Baylor University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Tom and I were in the Baylor Journalism Program together many years ago and we've become lifelong friends. We recorded this episode a few months ago, but it's still very relevant to what's going on today. Thanks so much, Tom, for joining me today.

Thank you very much, Kay, for inviting me. When I retired from professional journalism, I was able finally to let my freak flag fly and be active in politics again.

And that is, I was free to put, for the first time in 45 years, to put a sign in the yard to let people know who I voted for and who I support. And my wife and I are big supporters of the Democratic Party and almost every Democratic candidate you can think of.

So I wanted to make sure that supplemented that part of my biography for today's situation.

Well, that's a good point because journalists have traditionally been very reticent to express personal opinions about things because of the mandate and the challenge to be neutral and to present things in a way that all sides can believe. So I'm sure it's a freeing experience. Of course, I've kind of transitioned from, you know, from a journalist to an elected official.

And now I'm kind of returning to those journalism routes roots with this podcast and being able to interview interesting people. So I appreciate you taking some time to chat with me today about these changes to the media landscape which have been happening.

Give me a little bit of your perspective on how things have changed over the past few decades.

It has been a tremendous amount of change.

The real killer blow, though, was the Internet and the lack the change in advertising and the business model of newspapers, which depended on were commercial enterprises for the most part and depended on advertising. So once first classified advertising, then all kinds of other retail advertising, which were all the backbone of the newspaper business.

Once that disappeared and began to go to the Internet, it severely changed the the financial health of the news business.

And it seemed at the same time then first cell phones and then the smartphone began to make everyone a publisher and everyone having access to all of the news and information sources that they chose rather than things being pushed, it became a media pull situation, a dynamic so that you can choose where you get your news and information.

And it has led to a huge proliferation obviously of sources of information, some of them still very traditional, still some reliable, and many that are very questionable as to veracity and trustworthiness. And all of this coincided, of course, with the enormous changes in our political landscape beginning in the Reagan era.

And I may actually look at notes I made this morning.

The the Reagan era meant that the influence of political, of conservatives, voices in the judiciary, on the courts, in social policy of all sorts became far more influential. All of that led to the great evil that we know so much about.

In Texas, where I live, gerrymandering and those things obviously are what have so much influence today on our political landscape. And in the meantime, you have all the changes in the media that we've talked about. And so does that help? Is that a good way to start?

That's good. And that makes me think about. The proliferation of sources has led to what I kind of think of as information bubbles.

Where people are getting their news primarily from conservative sources would have one view of the world and people getting their news from progressive sources. A different view.

And the fact that we don't have so much of a common view of a common understanding of what's happening and what our leaders are doing and so forth, has really made it more difficult for democracy to function and for governance to take place in a rational manner.

Because as Trump's early on person said, we have alternative facts here and, you know, just different ways of approaching things and the role of the media that the media used to play in verifying everything. You know, when we were in school, we learned if you didn't have multiple sources, it just didn't fly.

You couldn't just take one person's opinion and put it out there as the facts. And we had fact checkers and editors and a lot of scrutiny of what went out in the print press.

It seems like that has just evaporated for the most part today.

I'm sure it still exists in the large traditional media in our country, but a lot of what we're seeing now around on the Internet and in many of these places is just misinformation. How do people tell what's reliable and what's not?

They have to be to educate themselves in these areas.

That all of the landscape that you're describing is so very true, with people being able to select their sources of information and therefore having that influence what they think and how they vote. That media literacy is a term that I really hope becomes more embedded in the early education.

Beginning as early as grade school, elementary education, trying to get young people to spend less time hooked into, addicted to their devices, to their smartphones is one of the.

It has to start there because you have people, so many young people use social media and their own, what they're hearing from friends and rumors and those kinds of things that there needs to be a real effort on leaders and the adults in the room to try to educate young people on, on how to sort fact from fiction. The problem you describe is extremely important, very difficult one.

So much of it, too, goes back to what leaders of the country have to say about it. The. The I keep focusing and I will keep focusing on how much gerrymandering has affected, infected our, our way of looking at it.

One thing that you said earlier about fact checking and how we used to have so many gatekeepers and now we do not have those anymore that the surveys today say that young people, especially teenagers and young adults actually believe that the traditional mainstream media tells lies, makes things up the exact opposite of the way that people of our generation think of it. And those ideas are very unfortunately prevalent.

Of course I always wonder in those surveys do they really need what is their familiarity with mainstream media, do they really read it, why do they think that and whether they think that it's dishonest and makes up things. So that's where media literacy and trying to help young people understand those things.

Well, certainly one of the ways is that we identify and can vet out various sources and as we mentioned in the introduction, you've been working with a lot of new so called news sources and alternative sources sponsored by nonprofit news orgs and websites that are being news sources of where people are getting their information. Tell us about some of the ones that you think are reliable and that you're familiar with as being trusted sources that people can depend on.

Yes, those nonprofit news sources have risen in direct response to the lack of to the the disappearance of the net mainstream sources mainstream media and among those that I have found are extremely helpful these days are many of them on a regional basis one a few national ProPublica Investigates does investigative stories all online. It is initially you can read it for free.

That's propublica.com all of them.com are.org of course inside Climate News is another one that specializes just in covering climate issues.

It's extremely good one that I find extremely helpful too right now is called the trace thetrace.org be traced all one word and it focuses only on gun violence.

Have an excellent story today as a matter of fact on what's going on in Texas which is there's been a great deal of focus on the Senate race and other races in Texas.

This story by Inside Climate News came to I mean by the Trace focused on the shooting in Austin which was a link to terrorism which by the right wing media and administration what is it and how it relates to the races going on in Texas and how it's going to affect the Senate race and U.S. senate race in Texas very well could help determine whether Democrats are able to get control of the Senate again. And the relationship between those issues is the kind of thing that a good news source puts together.

And those are there are many others that are function mostly on a regional or a local basis.

Mississippi today is one that's won Pulitzer prizes in the state of Mississippi, and they also have a branch in Louisiana bringing some light to those benighted parts of the world.

And that the other the in in every community these days, not every community, yes, we have, we have a vast number of news deserts, as they're called, where the local media has disappeared. But you also, you do have some replacement in those places of nonprofit news sites. People can find them.

I think local political parties probably can help them. People find some of them.

Among them, Texas Public Radio, for example, even with the cutbacks in support for at the federal level for public media, that there's still strong, healthy TV stations, not as healthy as they once were, but they're still there. And in Texas, for example, Texas Public Radio does a fine job.

And those are among the things that we support because that, that's a good just it makes a great deal of sense to place money with those people, to those organizations because of what their effort they're making.

So one thing I wanted to ask you is as you look around at the sources of media today and what's prominent in our national conversation, do you think the media as a whole are doing enough to expose and criticize the current administration's policies?

Cruelty, craziness, corruption, on and on of the things that are coming to light, are they doing enough, you know, this both sides ism, that journalism historically has been the template for he said and then she said the other side. And you know, it's just presented in a balanced way.

And when that's done with Trump, we just, they sometimes don't always mention that these actions and things being done are illegal, unconstitutional, highly controversial and not necessarily achievable. But he just says we're doing this, and people report it as if it were true. So I'm sometimes scratching my. Why aren't they pointing this out?

I mean, what do you think? Do you think the media should do more given the situation we're in?

The problem that you describe, I think it depends entirely where you're getting your news. If you do as I try to do every day and read the New York Times, I do get both sideism.

I get them reporting what the media, what Trump has said, what his people are saying, what Republicans are saying, and I get the counter to it.

And especially if you read the opinion pages and the analysis, many, many stories, many every front page these days have something designated Analysis which points out those problems, that they're not telling the truth. And individuals can only do so much.

You could try to read, try to find something, believe it or not, the front page of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal. I do have a bought it since the Rupert Murdoch owns it. I refuse to give him any money.

But I'll give credit to their having a reputation and trying to do a straight job. The other source, you have to go to the sources that we're talking about. You have to find your own sources.

Start with the Democratic Party of Riverside county and what they put out, what it points out as in pointing to issues and look for these other sources. Look for alternatives. Yes, go into your own silo, if that's what it is. That's where you need to find it.

And then come back out and write a letter to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or join the chorus of saying here's what the facts are and. And we need to cover more of it. The comments section of what's online is enormous. I never catch up fast enough to make comments online.

It's already too many other people have already commented.

Well, that's kind of one of the challenges, isn't it? Things are overwhelming so much it's hard to know where to go and where to focus and whatnot.

That's right.

So let's wrap up with this. You are there in Texas and politics are changing there now, it appears.

How do you see the prospects in the upcoming midterms which are just around the corner?

We have a unusual situation with mainstream media here. Hearst Corporation, traditional newspaper operator, has bought all the major sources left.

The major mainstream newspapers in Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, each one of those all owned by Hearst, traditional pretty conservative organization, but report straight both sides of a lot of issues. You start there and you will see that we do have a very lively Senate race going on here.

It's gotten our Democratic candidate here, James Talarico has gotten huge amounts of national coverage in the last few weeks recently. Big things in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker. Big, big profile.

I was looking at his New Yorker today and he's got a full page picture of him, a very interesting person and he won the primary and he's going to face and we have a very classic ugly Republican primary still with two candidates and the worst could still happen. But there's hope there. And go and read what the Trace wrote today and how it relates to that race. That's my advice.

That's part of finding your own sources of news, you have to work at it, but that's what to do, I think.

Well, thank you so much for chatting with me, Tom.

Thank you, Kay. It's delightful.

I just have a few closing remarks about the importance of the media.

And their participation is so crucial to the success of our democracy that they're, you know, sometimes known as the fourth branch of government because they do provide that informal check on power, and they are able to inform us about what's going on, to get in people's face and ask questions and get answers.

And, you know, the media, by choosing what to cover or not cover, influences what the public and politicians focus on and shape what becomes politically urgent. And I'll just end with this. There is nothing more politically urgent now than an overwhelming Democratic victory in the midterms.

So we can have the opportunity to hold Trump and his team accountable. And the media has, you know, a hugely important role to play.

I just hope that individual reporters and editors and owners and everybody involved, that they have the courage to report the truth without fear or favor to the powerful, and that these new media conglomerates don't silence the voices that are there trying to provide us with the information we need, need to stop the slide into authoritarianism.