Boren is executive director of the Institute for Media and Public Trust at California State University, Fresno.
When I watch TV coverage of a news conference at the White House, I’m reminded of how reporting resources are disproportionately allocated in today’s news environment. The journalists at the White House are essentially all giving us the same story, while city council and school board meetings across America are not being covered because of cutbacks in local newsrooms.
How much better for our democracy would it be if we could say we had “too many” reporters covering local news? Instead, we have communities dubbed “news deserts,” meaning they don’t have news sites covering public agencies and other essential information that citizens need to make decisions about their local democratic institutions.
Fortunately, there are news leaders working on this issue, and right now philanthropy has become a major funding source for hiring local reporters. Let’s be clear: Philanthropy isn’t going to replace the thousands of journalists who lost their jobs because of the broken news business model. But it will help local newsrooms cover their communities.
I recently returned from Raleigh, N.C., where I attended a crucial board meeting of Journalism Funding Partners, a nonprofit group that is trying to help save local journalism by raising money to pay the salaries of reporters. JFP is one of several such organizations working on the challenge. If we don’t, misinformation and disinformation are only going to increase, with an unchallenged social media pushing these untruths along.
These organizations have made excellent progress, but they must do much more to keep journalists writing about their local communities. I’m thrilled to volunteer on the JFP board, and I believe the many other similar nonprofits trying to fund local journalism are making a difference.
It was about three years ago when a few of us came together to see if we could help in a small way reverse the fortunes of the news industry by capitalizing on the idea of using philanthropy to fund local journalists. JFP’s founding board members were veteran journalists, who intimately knew the impact that exceptional journalism can have in communities.
The idea quickly took fire, and JFP began matching donors with local newsrooms across the nation. JFP became so successful that, since 2020, we have helped secure more than $3 million in grants to support local journalism. This includes funding 15 climate reporters. The stories these reporters are covering would not have been told without this funding.
We deeply believe that local journalism is crucial to our democracy because well-informed citizens make smart decisions about their communities. Conversely, when city councils, school boards and planning commissions hold meetings without reporters telling the public what happened, bad decisions often are made. Studies have shown that politicians spend money more recklessly and government is less efficient in communities where there aren't journalistic watchdogs.
Look at JFP's work so far. We are helping fund reporters just about everywhere you look – in Fresno, Sacramento, Modesto, Miami, Fort Worth, as well as in communities in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, just to offer a partial list. These are new reporters who would not be there without JFP.
At our July meeting in Raleigh, our 11-member board began planning our vision for the next five years of JFP. These are some of the best strategic thinkers in the industry. One goal is to put $10 million annually into local journalism. To be clear, this money goes directly to hire reporters, and not for newspaper operations.
I'm confident that JFP will continue to make a major impact in local journalism, and local communities will be better informed because of our work to secure newsroom funding. We raise funds from foundations, major donors and individuals. We also act as the "fiscal sponsor" to allow nonprofits to direct funding to newsrooms using JFP as the intermediary. This allows donors to make tax-deductible contributions. We operate under strict IRS guidelines.
The money goes to JFP and then to newsrooms, and funders do not have any say on what gets covered, other than the grants are to be used for climate reporters, in that particular example. Newsroom editors make coverage decisions exclusively.
Our board has extensive experience in journalism, education, law, nonprofits and philanthropy. Over the past year, we have hired a full-time executive director, veteran journalist Rusty Coats, and that has allowed us to make great strides as an organization. We are now prepared for the next phase of our work.
Philanthropy isn’t the only answer, but it will help fund local journalism until newsrooms come up with a better model to hire and support local journalists.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.