In his recent piece for Court Watch, a news site covering interesting, yet often overlooked federal court filings, Lawfare Associate Editor Peter Beck wrote about the Middle District of Georgia, which is “filled with rich news stories that even a few years ago would have been quickly reported” but which “now sits in a so-called ‘news desert,’ a place that is largely devoid of even a single newspaper, let alone a reporter dedicated to its federal court.”
Out of Georgia’s 17 counties without a single local news source, 12 fall within the Middle District of Georgia’s jurisdiction. Unfortunately, this district is not alone in this regard, writes Beck, but rather “part of a broader trend of the death of local news, leaving community members uninformed about important developments in their neighborhoods and leading to less and less transparency in the legal system.”
For today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Beck, as well as Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) and the founder of Court Watch, to discuss what happens when “dockets die in darkness.”
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