Why should I care?

Why should I care?
This is a question we hear all too often in our day-to-day lives. Not only do we hear it from others' mouths, but each of us are culprits of using this dreaded phrase.
This crisis of apathy has hit the local politic world especially hard. In our Journalism course, we recently did a study of several newspapers from around the state of North Carolina. The numbers are disturbing:

83--newspapers studied
5209--articles in said papers
6--percent of articles covering local politics
5--percent of articles covering state politics
11--percent of articles covering national politics
27--percent of articles covering sports

The Wilmington StarNews seems far ahead of the curve with 9.1 percent of its articles covering local politics, while the Winston-Salem Journal lags behind the rest with only 4.6 percent. The rest of the papers--Greensboro News & Record, Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer and the Fayetteville Observer--all hover around 6 percent.
Who takes the blame for this? Are the newspapers shirking their responsibility? Or do we just not care enough for the papers to validate including more information?
This question may prove impossible to answer. Yes, newspapers should have an obligation to report the news as it is, but in an age when papers are hurting already they can't take s chance of losing more readers by reporting news that people don't want to read.
Why should I care? As a population we care more about baseball and gossip than town hall meetings. This is an absolute truth. But one of the fundamental roles of the media is that of GateKeeper. This is to say that the media has complete control over the information that we get and by not giving us the whole scope of information the papers are essentially keeping us in the dark.
Why should I care? Local politics directly affect each of us. If we don't care then the system doesn't working. Our current political structure relies on us caring and us caring relies on the papers and other media relaying the best information.
We should care we're just not being allowed to.

Posted by Jordan Powell