Community journalism is a ghost of itself. How might its demise harm Delaware?

Also, meet Jonathan Tate, Democratic Socialists of America organizer.

By Greg Layton

A dying news media bodes poorly for Delawareans’ political, financial, and physical health.

In this piece, I will explain how decreased attention to government decisions, especially local government decisions, harms us all.

In later pieces, I will offer a possible solution.

Let me start by putting our current situation in perspective by describing the local media landscape I entered as a 22-year-old reporter in 1996.

Back then, a distant 30 years ago, I commonly saw two or more other reporters at public meetings I attended. Whether I covered a school board meeting, a city council meeting, or any other meeting of a local elected body, I could be sure that other eyes were present and my reporting would be compared to theirs

Lively competition kept us motivated and honest, as did the fact that most of us were native to the communities we covered. We wanted our hometowns to do well, and most of us believed that providing our friends, families, and neighbors with clear and relevant information about government debates and decisions could help them thrive.

We saw ourselves as instruments of democracy and enjoyed a small degree of prestige, like a mayor or a fire chief, if we performed our duties responsibly. We mattered to the life of the community.

Sure, we knew the profession was dying. Thanks to competition for advertising from television and radio, the number of American newsrooms had already plummeted from about 26,000 before World War II to fewer than 10,000 by the turn of the century. Competition from the internet only hastened the industry’s demise.

But at the dawn of the 21st Century, every Delaware community with at least 5,000 residents had at least one reporter assigned to cover its local governments full-time. Larger communities enjoyed coverage from teams as large as five or six.

That meant regular news about upcoming decisions, explanations of costs and benefits, overviews of different perspectives on policy debates, and – of course – coverage of the actual votes on policy.

This was relatively easy because we covered these beats full-time, lived among the people we covered, people we knew and liked, and wished to serve them effectively.

The last thing we wanted to hear during Happy Hour at the local watering hole was, “What about this referendum coming up? I haven’t read anything about it. How old is that building, anyway? And how do I calculate what my tax increase might be?”

We anticipated residents’ questions and made damn sure we answered them in print because, quite simply, our livelihoods depended upon our being reliable– and our friends and family would hear about it if we weren’t.

A quarter century later, however, I think it’s safe to say that most meetings of most local governments in Delaware take place without a single journalist present, and that, when coverage happens, stories too often address social media outrage about decisions that have already occurred.

In other words, they don’t provide much information that readers/voters can put to any practical use.

Among the obvious effects of lost news coverage are:

• Less-informed voters.

• Less-accountable leaders.

• Less-engaged communities.

• Proliferating misinformation and disinformation.

• Decreasing community spirit / increasing polarization.

Some scholars believe communities without local news operations typically pay higher taxes, suffer inefficient government, attract less economic development, and even receive less favorable terms from investors. Such communities, which now include most communities in Delaware, may also be more vulnerable to disease.

I won’t blame the staff remaining at Delaware news outlets for these problems. I know a few of them, and they are doing their best, often for little money. But, because of their scarcity, they’re asked to cover more beats in more places than they can dig into, so superficial drive-by coverage is what we should expect.

So, how can we address the problem?

I haven’t discovered a silver bullet yet, but I intend to examine the situation and consider solutions in the weeks ahead.

If you have any ideas, please send them to gregorylayton@pm.me.com

In the next issue of The Delaware Project, I plan to go a little deeper into what most community newspapers delivered to their communities not that long ago. I hope you’ll read along and consider what we’ve lost — and what we might get back (in one form or another).

Questions and answers with Jonathan Tate, Democratic Socialists of America

Each week, the Delaware Project tries to feature a question-and-answer feature with someone deeply involved in First State activism, government, or another effort to improve the lives of Delawareans. We ask them about their work and what others can do to help. This week, we feature Jonathan Tate, who was term-limited as co-chair of the Delaware Democratic Socialists of America after three terms.

You recently completed your term as chair of the Delaware Democratic Socialists of America and are widely recognized as one of the top progressive organizers in the First State. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you into political work.

Thank you for saying I'm widely recognized as one of Delaware's top progressive organizers! Not sure how wide that recognition is myself, but I'll accept the compliment. I'm 29 years old and a City of Wilmington native. While I moved out to suburban North Wilmington in my early teens, where I still reside, the city is still my political north star. While I had certain privileges growing up (being white, being born to college-educated parents, etc.), these were not things granted to most of my peers in the 19802 ZIP code where I grew up on the Northside of Wilmington, in fact, it is the 2nd poorest ZIP code in Delaware.

The first engagement I had with politics was engaging in anti-Iraq War protests when I was 8 or 9 with my parents because we were terrified that my uncle, who was at the Naval Academy at the time, would be sent there and killed (neither of which happened, though he did serve two tours in Afghanistan which gave him PTSD, an experience that really pushed me from being more liberal to being more leftist). I was pretty interested in politics as a teenager too, both because my grandfather had been a two-term state representative back in the 1970s and helped me get a summer internship at the Democratic House Caucus in high school, but more importantly because when I moved out to the suburbs and even before then when I was a scholarship kid at a private school in Ardencroft, I saw how much opportunity was out there that wasn't accessible to so many kids in Wilmington.

Even to use a small example: I couldn't be as skilled as my soccer teammates growing up even up to the high school level because there were *zero* public soccer fields in Wilmington at the time for us to practice on. My ultimate overarching political goal, however idealistic it is, is for a kid in West Center City to have the same opportunities as a kid in Hockessin to achieve their full human potential doing all the awesome things that human beings are capable of, whether in sports, the arts, academics, politics, or any other arena.

For a while I was disillusioned and actually rage-quit the Democratic Party when I was 18 because I saw no hope for a left voice anywhere within the political arena: but of course the Bernie Sanders campaign changed all that, and got me re-engaged with the party to the point where I became the Temple University College Democrats Secretary. We truly had a fantastic cadre that includes 2 DSA chapter co-chairs (myself included), a DSA chapter communications co-chair in a major city, a member of the Biden administration, Gov. Josh Shapiro's executive scheduler, and an Eastern Region College Democrats President, and we were the most progressive and Bernie-friendly College Dems chapter in Pennsylvania, giving the socialist Senator 86% support in our endorsement vote over Secretary Clinton in 2016.

But after college, I didn't really do much politically for a while. I didn't have much direction and landed in the finance industry because it was the first place that would give me a decent job, and my goal was to rise to the top of the bank and be a CEO or something that would give me enough money to solve my hometown's problems by redistributing capital to the needy public and putting in ladders of opportunity, or if I shot for the moon and missed, at least become upper-middle-class and have enough money to make a modest living helping out low-income Wilmingtonians with their finances by the time I was near retirement age, and I didn't do too much than work, drink beer, and watch sports like other finance bros.

But, when I moved back to Delaware, I got involved with the Jess Scarane campaign a little bit. I accepted an invitation to join the Delaware DSA chapter after liking one of their Facebook posts, in part because my dad had been at least on paper a member of DSA ever since the day after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary and the radical beliefs he held in his days as an anti-Vietnam War protester seemed possible for him all over again.

Within just a couple of months, our founding co-chair, Andy Powers, saw *something* in me and asked me if I was okay with being groomed to be his successor as Co-Chair. I thought about it for a couple days, and both getting sick with COVID and my grandmother's terminal emphysema illness made me much more aware of my own mortality and the fact that I might die before I was old enough to get rich and give back to the community, so I relented and accepted this offer. While politics might not allow you to have *as* deep an impact as massive billion-plus philanthropy in a hyperlocal pond like Wilmington would, and it might require much more coalition and compromise with others, it's also a lever of power much, much more accessible to the average person like myself than money is. And then, the rest is history.

In case people misunderstand the term, please explain democratic socialism and what it might look like in practice in Delaware.

Democratic socialism to me is just the logical extension of liberal small-d democratic practices from the political sphere into the economic sphere, where the economy is democratically controlled by the workers instead of by a small ownership class: whether through regulation, redistribution, collective ownership of the means of production through the state in a Marxist sense, or through worker or consumer co-ops like credit unions or employee-owned businesses.

It would certainly be impossible to create "true" socialism in the Marxist sense in one U.S. state, especially a centrally located, small one like Delaware because of the ease of capital flight across porous borders to neighboring states, but we could create a state with substantially more redistribution of wealth (we are 8th in GDP per capita but only 24th in median personal income: that money is not vanishing into thin air!), but I think even more importantly we could create a Delaware with a substantial redistribution of *power* from the mostly old, mostly white, insular Delaware Way crowd to working Delawareans, Delawareans of color, LGBT+ Delawareans, and so forth.

This could come in the form of limiting the power of capital (such as preventing landlords from enacting outrageous rent hikes), limiting the power of the state to unjustly imprison people for cannabis, a drug that most Americans have used, limiting the power of the police to evade accountability for abuses of working people, especially Black people, by repealing LEOBOR, etc.

There's no one silver bullet that crosses the line into "socialism" exactly: but what we can create is a Delaware that can vastly reduce childhood poverty, have free education from pre-kindergarten through college, that can have publicly owned utilities that won't charge people in small, working class suburban ranch homes $1000+ bills, as happened to my friend this winter, that has a Green New Deal for Delaware implemented with a kitchen sink approach toward combatting climate change that includes not just climate resiliency infrastructure and electric cars but also robust mass transit, even in rural parts of the state, and enhanced infrastructure to make biking and walking more desirable, especially in dense suburban areas whose bike/pedestrian infrastructure does not match their density like the Route 13/40 corridor and the Naamans Road corridor where I live, and so much more that could make Delaware the happiest, healthiest, best to live in as an average citizen state in the country.

This isn't a fantasy: in the 1950s, Delawareans had *the highest median income in the country, nearly 3 times that of the lowest-income state of Mississippi*. There is nothing holding us back from that other than a lack of political will. Unfortunately, fire of that will is stamped out both by the very wealthy, who often write massive political checks from out-of-state, as well as by reactionaries who would rather see Delaware fail than see Black Delawareans, no longer burdened by Jim Crow as they were in post-WWII Delaware, succeed along with the rest of our state of neighbors.

The Delaware Democratic Socialists of America is about four years old, if I'm not mistaken. Tell us a little about how the organization has grown and affected Delaware politics.

The organization has grown for two reasons. The first is our willingness to engage directly in the community, especially tabling events, and recruiting people one-on-one through old-fashioned retail politics, an all-too-familiar Delaware art. The second is our willingness to embrace a diversity of tactics: whether it's electoralism, street protests (especially for Palestine), mutual aid, tenant organizing, and more, there are so many circles in which our members participate, and the recruiting pool multiplies so much as a result. I've recruited people into DSA who have phonebanked me for our own endorsed or recommended candidates, at protests for Palestine, and I even recruited someone at a bar one time! If we were doing electoral work, or just doing mutual aid, our chapter would be smaller and not have the capacity to do *anything* as well as we do.

As far as how it's affected Delaware politics, I'd say the most visually obvious effect to the average Joe on the street is just how far the Overton window has opened to the left. As best as I can determine, Delaware had never had any socialist politicians at any level prior to our chapter's founding in 2020. Now it's been proven that you do not have to be a capitalist to engage in the electoral arena in the corporate capital of the world, and that socialist politicians can indeed hold onto power even in the face of enormous opposition spending.

I'm very proud that not a single incumbent Delaware DSA-endorsed politician has ever lost their seat: it completely vindicates leftists when we say that people like our politics, they sometimes just need to get a taste of them to realize how much they like them! This isn't limited to the electoral arena either; people having fairs or setting up community event tables to promote socialist organizing in ruby-red towns like Ellendale and Bridgeville would've been unthinkable just a decade ago.

Now it's reality. Another area is the policy wins: some, such as cannabis legalization and the abolition of the death penalty, we played a major role in directly. But I think that a lot of the time simply successfully running insurgent left primary challengers to corporate Democrats as a warning shot to other corporate Dems to get on board can be the most time-efficient way of getting change across the finish line, especially in the wakes of close races like Rep. DeShanna Neal's 24-vote upset victory over the #3 House Democrat or more recently Wilmington City Councilman Coby Owens's 8-vote win in his race last year, where the DE DSA endorsement can easily be shown to have made the difference in election outcome. Of the 4 legislative session years that I've been co-chair for for all or part of, the 2023 session (after Rep. Neal's win that proved the 2020 DE DSA/DE Working Families Party wave was no fluke) was by far the most productive.

This year, in the wake of Coby's upset and that of a DE WFP City Councilwoman, Christian Willauer, Wilmington's City Council seems to be on the precipice of at least getting rent stabilization onto the Mayor's desk. I certainly hope that we have affected Delaware politics to be an arena more accessible to the left/to working people of all political stripes, and to be an arena of mostly positive change for Delaware's regular lower-class, working-class, and middle-class people: and I think we have, just not nearly to the extent I or any of us would like.

You also serve in the leadership of a representative district (RD) committee under the Delaware Democratic Party. What is the relationship between the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America?

Oh man, I thought I was being verbose before, but I could write a whole book on this topic! Before I say anything else I will say: there is near-universal *disgust* in DSA at the sclorotic, corrupt, servile Democratic *establishment*, which just handed Trump a presidency all to obey a declining, unpopular president in his defense of financing a genocide in Gaza.

I also think Delaware's state level Democratic establishment deserves more scorn than that of most states: despite the fact that we have *THE LONGEST RUNNING DEMOCRATIC TRIFECTA IN THE NATION*, we routinely rank at or near the bottom of the blue-state pack in nearly every quality of life metric from health to education to income and so forth (though of course due to Republican incompetence, this translates to middle-of-the-pack outcomes overall). With that out of the way, there are basically four schools of thought within DSA as far as our relationship to the Democratic Party; two are relatively major, the other two are pretty small but not fringe minority viewpoints.

The most popular viewpoint that I would say at least a plurality if not an outright majority of DSA members roughly subscribe to, and the one that in my opinion most accurately reflects the status quo of our relations with the Dems, is the "dirty stay". Basically, the dirty stay involves running endorsed candidates on the Democratic ballot line, but maintaining cooperation with each other (when more than 1 DSA elected is in one body of government) and DSA itself and most importantly maintaining oppositionality to the Democratic establishment's bullshit as an insurgent leftist wing of the party.

In my opinion, this is the strategy that makes the most sense because there is value to be gained in working within the Democratic Party structure, ideally in the form of actual power, but shutting out corporate Dems from positions where they can be obstructive to progress still has the same net effect, and it has been shown, especially by folks like DSA nationally-endorsed Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, that one can be fiercely oppositional to the establishment and still remain under the Democratic tent and be given committee chairmanships, however begrudgingly. She is an excellent role model of the dirty stay in practice.

The other major viewpoint is the concept of the "dirty break", where DSA candidates run on the Democratic ballot line but functionally act as an independent third party. How exactly this would work in practice differently than the dirty stay isn't entirely agreed upon, but common concepts are referencing "democratic socialist" and/or DSA instead of "Democrat" in campaign literature, pulling a reverse-Bernie and running as a Democrat but refusing to caucus with the Dems and making an independent DSA caucus, and refusing to endorse centrist Democrats. While this is of course possible, it can in many circumstances be very difficult, due to DSA's much smaller brand recognition than the Democratic Party's, lack of access to caucus staff for constituent services, far less support from left-liberal colleagues against ConservaDem primary challengers, etc.

There are some counterarguments to be made in favor though: when a DSA-backed slate (comprised mostly of members) won control of the Nevada Democratic Party, the establishment Dems essentially "dirty broke" by organizing a separate club, taking everything from staff to files that wasn't nailed down as soon as the Progressive Slate gained power, and even having the DNC deny all resources to the state party, giving them to an establishment-run county party, and even refusing to link to the Nevada Dems website.

The only relationship that was maintained was that the DSA folks who held seats on the DNC were still allowed to participate and cast votes. However, unlike in Delaware, Nevada's DSA chapters did not have any state-level elected officials to back them up, which is why I do not think that engaging in the party apparatus is nearly the waste of time it might have been for Las Vegas DSA or Northern Nevada DSA. Out of the 77 Democratic candidates on the ballot in Delaware last year, 7 of them were affiliated with DSA in some fashion: either as members, endorsees, or in most cases both. We're a minor part of the Delaware Democratic coalition, but we're not an irrelevant fringe that can be discarded wholesale.

The closest embodiment of the dirty break in reality here in Delaware would be City Councilwoman Shane' Darby: as City Council doesn't have caucuses, she does not caucus with the Dems by default and includes her DSA and WFP endorsements prominently on her campaign websites (though she more so uses her own independent branding on signs and literature, she's conscious to use "Democrat(ic)" as little as possible). However, based on her campaign announcement on Facebook for her second primary challenge to Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha that included Democratic hashtags, it seems like she might be tacking a bit more toward the "dirty stay" tactic, though again this is often shaped more by conditions than by candidate: the parties are much, much more powerful in Dover than they are on City Council, so there isn't *quite* as much wiggle room away.

One of the more minor viewpoints is that of the "clean break": that DSA should become its own third party and/or run our candidates as independents (but not ones like Bernie who caucus with the Democrats). We essentially already do this at the school board level in the Christina School District with our endorsed members on the board Doug Manley and Amy Trauth since those elections are nonpartisan, and it's easy to see why it's so attractive: we can run things smoothly and efficiently with our Socialists-in-Office Committee, and the need to make compromise seldom arises. However, when that rubber meets the road of partisan elections, it's a different story: DE DSA's only ever third-party endorsed candidate, Riley Figliola, netted just 88 votes, or 2.2% of the total, in her State Senate race in the SD-1 special election earlier this year.

Similarly, the Green Party has existed for decades and they don't even have a single state legislator, let alone Congressperson, while DSA has multiple members in Congress (though only Rep. Rashida Tlaib is nationally endorsed, others are non-endorsed or in the case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, only endorsed by their chapter), and dozens of state legislators across more than half of the states.

The last, probably least popular viewpoint is that of "re-alignment", or the "clean stay": the idea that simply being a left, but compliant caucus within the Democratic Party will bring about change.

A good example of this in Delaware is Rep. Claire Snyder-Hall. While she is a card-carrying member of DE DSA and DE WFP, she declined to seek the endorsement of either organization and has been more of a consensus-builder with House Democratic leadership than a firebrand progressive. While I think the fundamental concept of "inside power is good" behind realignment is in the right spot, too little opposition to the Democratic establishment inevitably leaves politicians and rank-and-file activists alienated in their feelings and actions from one another.

If the movement muscle used to punch right at the establishment and defend principled elected officials isn't used, it will atrophy and left electeds will be left with no one to defend them when they make tough choices: which often leads to making easy but wrong choices or losing power.

Based on your training and experience, what do you consider the No. 1 most important skill for political organizers to learn?

The number one most important skill to learn is to be able to take constructive criticism without letting bad-faith criticism get to your head and really screw up your mental health. In order to do this, it's important to surround yourselves with people who will be honest with you because if you don't have reassurance, you will take it all in and become insecure: a bad combination when mixed with power, and if you just surround yourself with yes men, you'll never be self-aware enough to know when you're doing the wrong thing and need to change course.

It's also important to have a robust personal life out of politics: it makes you much more resilient and able to take political blowback when you make tough choices, and it keeps your head from being sucked into political-insider bubbles and keeps you in touch with the street.

If you could change or enact just one law or regulation in Delaware, what would it be? And how would you go about organizing pressure to make that happen?

I would restore Delaware's New Deal era top income tax brackets adjusted for inflation, which would give a top tax rate of 18%, nearly triple today's top bracket, on the wealthiest citizens of the state.

I would organize people behind this by determining how much revenue could realistically be raised from this and widely advertise and publicize a program for a New New Deal for Delaware (maybe I'd work on the branding, but the concept would be roughly this) and outline ambitious but doable spending proposals on everything from public works, lead removal from schools and residences, building a medical school, etc. that can make real, tangibly obvious improvements to the lives of massive numbers of Delawareans. I would ideally get some friendly state legislators to sign on, and then launch a grassroots pressure campaign on any Democrat who wouldn't be willing to sign onto this program shortly thereafter.

I would also emphasize that *these tax brackets have existed before* and that Delaware is one of the few states without a statewide property tax or any sales tax: one of the few things that almost everyone from the far-left to the far-right in Delaware agrees are good things, myself included: property taxes can negatively impact people on fixed incomes and sales taxes are regressive punishments for being poor. The *way* Delaware does taxation is honestly one of the best of any state in the country in my opinion, we just need to tax *enough* to get enough revenue for the Delaware that we deserve.

Please use this space to address anything I haven't asked about.

Couple things to clear up for readers: Rep. Neal is no longer affiliated with DSA, by their own choosing, and the office I hold on my Democratic district committee (RD-10, northern North Wilmington) is that of Treasurer.