yes! like, I've worked in local news, some of it is still ok. I think all tv news is too surface level to be that meaningful, but some local channels still try to actually investigate local things that matter.

but like you said, bigger cities have nothing like that. neither do small enough communities. and many local news companies have been gutted or taken as puppets by Sinclair or fts or whoever. I was working at a local fox affiliate in 2018. they weren't bad when i started because they were owned by hearst. Hearst is a broadcast distributor that affects minimal control over the content its stations produce. they recognize the value is preserving the teams and practices of the stations they buy. in 2019 that were bought by Fox directly. after that we were required to run every second of trump talking and kept having national anti abortion stories pushed on us. we had almost no time available for local content and even the stuff that did get scheduled would get bumped by trump being late for a press conference. he was over an hour late on average and we had to sit there and wait for him through every second of it.

There's gotta be some way to do something like turning NPR and PBS into a multi-media state funded NGO to support the news industry at the local, state, and national levels. Probably international too but that'd probably require oversight from the Dept of State because of the heightened risk of international journalists becoming political prisoners. Maybe making journalists diplomats as a shield for their reporting.

IDK how it'd all have to work, you need to balance the need to keep all tiers of journalism funded with the authoritarians who'd see that and immediately begin seeing opportunities to coerce desirable reporting.