There’s a moment in a lot of local government decisions where the public finally takes notice, and it’s often late in the process. A rezoning has been working its way through a planning commission for months. A contract was approved in a budget meeting most people didn’t know was happening. An ordinance took shape across several board sessions before it ever became news.
By the time it lands on someone’s radar, it can feel like the decision has already been made.
This is the slow erosion that researchers have been documenting for years. When local government coverage thins out, communities don’t just lose information, they lose participation. Voter turnout drops. Public comment periods go unfilled. Decisions that shape neighborhoods, schools, and local economies get made in rooms that are technically open to the public but practically invisible to most of it.
The people most affected often find out after the fact, if they find out at all.
Space Set Aside by Design
There’s a reason public access channels were written into the communications infrastructure of this country. When cable television expanded across American communities in the 1970s and 80s, local governments negotiated something in return for granting cable franchises: dedicated channels for public, educational, and government use. PEG access wasn’t an afterthought, it was a policy decision rooted in a straightforward idea. An informed community needs more than what the market will provide on its own.
The market, left to its own logic, will always prioritize content that attracts the largest audience. Civic meetings don’t do that. They’re slow, procedural, and often technical. But they’re also where the decisions get made and where the public has a right, and arguably a responsibility, to be present.
PEG access channels created a guaranteed place for that content to live. Not because it was profitable, but because the health of our communities has infrastructure costs.
The Landscape Has Changed. The Logic Hasn’t.
While channels were more limited when PEG access was established, the civic argument behind it was never really about scarcity, it was about priority. Some content matters to a community’s health whether or not the market rewards it. That logic is as true today as it was forty years ago.
What has changed is the landscape. Today’s media environment isn’t constrained by channel capacity, it’s shaped by algorithms. And algorithms optimize for engagement, not civic value. A contentious township meeting about battery energy storage systems will never outperform a viral video for watch time. A planning commission discussion about a zoning variance won’t trend. The content exists, but the systems designed to surface content aren’t built to find it.
This is a different kind of erasure than losing a local newspaper. It’s not that the coverage disappears, it’s that it gets buried under everything else competing for attention. The result is similar: a public that is technically free to access civic information but practically unlikely to encounter it.
The Unfiltered Record
There’s another dimension worth naming. Even when local journalism is healthy, it operates through a filter. A reporter attends a meeting, identifies what’s significant, and produces a story. That story is valuable, but it’s also a digest. It reflects one person’s judgment about what mattered.
The full meeting is something different. It’s the complete record, available to anyone who wants to go to the source. You can watch a resident make a case at a public comment podium. You can hear the questions a board member asks, or doesn’t ask. You can form your own opinion about what was decided, how it was decided, and whether the process was what it should have been.
That kind of access doesn’t replace journalism. It complements it. And for the people who want to go deeper, who want to be informed on their own terms before they show up to the next meeting, write a letter, or talk to their neighbors about what’s happening in their community, it’s irreplaceable.
What PMN Does and Why It Matters
Public Media Network has been covering local government in Kalamazoo for decades, rooted in exactly the PEG access tradition described above. The meetings PMN covers aren’t covered because they’re dramatic, though sometimes they are. They’re covered because they’re the places where community decisions get made, and because the public has a right to see that process in full.
These are not abstract civic issues. They are the specific, consequential decisions that shape life in this community, and they happen in public, on the record, available to anyone who wants to watch.
That’s what’s at stake when no one’s watching. And that’s what changes when someone is.
