foundering

California has a problem. It’s not homelessness, a lack of housing or the state’s increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at length.

It’s truth decay.

If you believe that information is the taproot of knowledge and expanding personal vistas is key to learning, there’s a case to be made that the great Golden State — quietly, with scant notice — is growing more impoverished by the day.

In the last quarter of a century, a third of California newsrooms have closed.

Nearly 7 in 10 journalists have lost their jobs.

The relentlessly cruel economics of the news business, driven in good part by the voracious profiteering of monoliths such as Google and Facebook, has devastated the industry — including the newsroom that employs your friendly columnist — drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the rest of the country, vastly worse off.

There’s an information vacuum and that space is filling up with garbage.

Increasingly, the daily diet of “news” that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely style themselves as prophets of the unvarnished truth.

(If you genuinely can’t differentiate between news and commentary, such as this, or between those making an honest attempt to present a fair, all-things-considered account of events versus someone shaving, eliding and shoehorning facts to fit a predetermined narrative, here’s a suggestion: Save time, skip the rest of this column and turn to the sports or comics pages.)

Not long ago, California took a baby step toward addressing this rampant decay.

Now, even that tiny effort is tottering.

In August 2024, the state and Google reached a deal to invest $175 million over five years in local journalism. It was a compromise of sorts, and a lopsided one at that. Lawmakers were pushing a measure, similar to those enacted in Australia and Canada, that would have forced tech giants to pay online publishers for the ransacking, er, use, of their journalistic content.

They can well afford it.

In just one year — 2018 — Google made $4.7 billion from the work of news outlets, according to the News Media Alliance, a trade organization. The company’s share of its agreement with California — $55 million — is barely a speck on its balance sheet; revenue for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, topped $102 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings report.

Google spent $11 million lobbying to kill the journalism-support legislation, but eventually agreed to kick in at least something. Facebook took an oppositional stance — greed and amorality apparently being endemic to its corporate culture — and threatened to remove news posts from its social media platforms if California forced the company to cough up for the news it used.

Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed the deal with Google, modest though it was, with characteristic grandiosity.

“This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California,” he said. “The deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy.”

The reality, however, has turned out quite differently.

In May 2025, Newsom slashed the state’s first-year commitment to the newsroom-subsidy program from $30 million to $10 million, citing budget constraints. (In the same budget year, California vastly expanded its film and TV tax credit, showing where the governor’s priorities lay.) Google then said it would match the state’s $10-million investment and no more.

But even that $20 million has yet to reach newsrooms. And going forward, the prospects for boosting California’s stretched-thin newsrooms look exceedingly dim.

In his most recent budget proposal, released this month, Newsom proposed precisely zero dollars for the so-called Newsroom Transformation Fund. Which means Google is on the hook for precisely zero dollars — though any contribution at all is subject to the company’s goodwill.

“The deal was never etched in paper and signed by any party — it was a handshake agreement in principle,” Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, told CalMatters. (The Oakland Democrat was a key participant in negotiations with Google.)

“There was never any penalty or consequence built into the agreement,” Ivie said, “as the arrangement is voluntary, not coercive.”

Steve Glazer, a former Democratic state senator from Orinda, authored legislation that would have imposed an “extraction” fee on the major tech platforms, raising about $500 million a year that California news outlets could have used to hire local journalists. It passed the Senate in June 2024 on a two-thirds vote but was torpedoed as part of the compromise that resulted in the deal with Google.

Glazer, who left the Legislature in December 2024, has continued his fight to sustain local journalism, serving as a senior advisor to the group Rebuild Local News, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that seeks to do what its name suggests.

“A functioning democracy has independent news as [a foundation] for oversight and accountability,” Glazer said, noting the erasure of two-thirds of professional journalists in California in the last 25 years. “The ability of the public to get information, discern the facts and have reasoned opinions about who’s in charge and doing what is in serious jeopardy without a robust local news community.”

Forcing social media platforms to pay for the news and information they pilfer and monetize seems a quite modest and reasonable step. Not just to provide news publishers the equivalent of a fair and honest wage, but also to bolster our wobbling democracy by fostering an engaged and knowledgeable electorate.

It’s not too much to ask of lawmakers: Make California robustly informed again.