Cable television is dying. Except for the news channels, which primarily have an older, steadily dwindling viewership, cable is mostly a rerun factory. Entertainment conglomerates have largely gone all in on streaming, but with programming spread across dozens of different streaming services, it isn’t yet profitable. With streaming services beginning to buy up sports broadcasting rights and bundling, cable’s days are numbered.

In its place, we can expect entertainment and sports bundles in the future. What does this mean for news, which streamers have little incentive to produce? Cable news has been a distorting environment for our democracy and the political discourse it produces is mostly negative, but I’m not sure what comes next will be any better. And with most Americans today receiving local broadcast channels through their cable box, trading a cable bundle for a streaming bundle might leave local affiliates and programming behind, too, further intensifying the problem of news deserts across much of the country.

For our August print issue, I wrote about the future of streaming and how policymakers can act to save local programming and make news accessible even after cable collapses. Democracy demands a variety of news and information available to people wherever they can be reached. The death of local news would be a disaster.

You can read the full piece here.

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