The local information environment reflects a community’s experience with a war’s local casualties. As this experience varies across communities, so too does the information environment. The intensity of the experience is also reflected in the information environment. When a community has suffered more wartime losses, those deaths receive more coverage, even when we control for community-specific factors and size. While national media are more likely to report on international stories in general, specific local media give more attention to an international story if it includes local casualties. These local news stories include powerful elements, most notably military funerals and flag-draped coffins that make the stories vivid and highly influential. These scripted events represent standard, well-known symbols of loss that clearly and powerfully convey the cost of combat, directly affect ETC, and therefore significantly dampen public support for fighting a war. Social networks also contribute to individuals having varied levels of information about a war’s costs that in turn influence their variation in predictions of a war’s ETC and powerfully alters their views.

Aufderheide asks: can US public broadcasting provide a unique bulwark againstdisinformation? There are ample reasons to look to the public broadcasting service, at a timewhen commercial journalism’s business model has eroded and disinformation from US andother governments as well as from commercial sources abounds. The service was foundedwith a Progressive-era rhetoric of service to an informed public, and it has withstood relentlessattacks from neoconservatives, although not without casualties. Public broadcasting has twoof the most trusted media brands in the USA, NPR and PBS. Aufderheide shows how thestructure of public broadcasting both limits its ability to serve as a counter to disinformation,and, also in some ways protects it against attacks.