It's not Harris's new marriage that's making Democrats smile. It's Biden's divorce. Voters are relieved. And they can mostly thank the news media.

They also take credit for it: Disgruntled voters have been telling pollsters for months that President Biden is too old to run for reelection and serve a second term, but the president and Democratic leaders have ignored them.

It was print, digital and television journalists who constantly told the public about Biden's decline. Who else would tell it honestly? Surely not the government, but the White House and Democratic congressional leaders.

And when the 81-year-old Biden performed miserably in his June debate with Donald Trump, professional journalists did their job. They wrote about the president's decline and covered it. The editorial pages, especially at The New York Times, He urged Biden to step down.

This shocked Democratic leaders, who finally plucked up the courage to pressure Biden to drop out of the race.

None of this would have happened without a functioning independent and free press, as the Founding Fathers envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's standard-bearer will remain Biden, not Vice President Kamala Harris.

This is a very glaring example of the invaluable value of strong journalism to a healthy democracy. Weak journalism leads to a sick democracy. A functioning democracy must be underpinned by ensuring that citizens receive reliable information. Misinformation is filling the vacuum left by the decline of fact-based journalism.

But the entire news reporting industry is in dangerous decline in the United States and in much of the free world. In the United States, this is especially true in small and medium-sized towns, where there are constant examples of corrupt and incompetent politicians who need to be ousted because of their decline.

A strong press is essential to holding elected representatives accountable and in turn informing voters of their good deeds, but press coverage has declined sharply in county courthouses and city halls across California, as well as in the State Capitol.

Over the past two decades, the size of the congressional press corps and the Times bureau has shrunk by two-thirds.

Part of the reporting gap is being filled by nonprofit foundation-funded organizations. CalMatters, The company is giving traditional news outlets their articles for free, which could be a harbinger of things to come and a way to prevent more regions from falling into so-called news deserts.

Newspapers are disappearing. Nationwide, roughly a third of them — 2,500 — have closed since 2005, with the scale of the closures varying. Most of the papers that remain open have made significant cuts to staff; roughly two-thirds of journalists have lost their jobs. In January, The Times laid off more than 100 editorial staff members.

It's not just print media that is shrinking: broadcast and digital media are shrinking too.

The culprits are the big internet and social media platforms that are taking jobs from news media without compensation and building their own advertising programs around the stories they steal. Or taking the information and creating their own posts. This is the disruptive future of AI.

Newspaper advertising has dried up, and manipulation of the platforms has made it impossible for revenue to be replaced by internet advertising.

In Congress, Democrats have been trying for two years to craft a bill that would require the biggest internet platforms, including Google, to provide funding to save journalism, meaning they would have to pay a minimum amount for articles they have plagiarized.

But time is running out: The Legislature's two-year term ends on Aug. 31.

The internet monopolies are fighting back hard, pressuring lawmakers and running a ton of dishonest TV ads claiming that Congress wants to support big hedge funds and not local newspapers. This is nonsense. Some newspapers and TV stations are owned by big corporations and financiers, but they still report local news.

Negotiations between lawmakers and internet lobbyists appear to be going nowhere, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has remained silent.

There are two bills under consideration, each of which has passed its own house but is stalled in the other.

AB 886, introduced by Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), is modeled on laws enacted in Australia and Canada. The bill would require big platforms like Google to pay news companies for their products. The fees would be determined through arbitration. At least 70% of the funds would have to go to journalists.

SB 1327, introduced by Sen. Steve Glaser (D-Orinda), would impose a California “data extraction fee,” or sales tax, on platforms that make more than $2.5 billion a year from advertising to California residents. It would hit Google, Amazon, and Meta and generate $1 billion a year, half of which would go to a partial tax credit for reporters' salaries and the other 40 percent would go to schools.

The platforms argue that this will lead to higher advertising rates.

“It's ridiculous. It's counterproductive. They're already getting the maximum rates. And it would increase advertising competition,” Glaser said. [from news outlets]lowering interest rates.”

“Tech platforms drive clicks and profit enormously from the hard work of journalists,” state Senate Leader Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) said in a statement last week after Wicks' bill passed a key Senate committee. “Working together, these bills will help level the playing field.”

But there are fears that state legislatures will pass weak bills that essentially give internet monopolies immunity from light-weight regulation.

“It could do more harm than good to journalism,” said Matt Pierce, president of the Media Guild of the West, a union representing news workers. “Whatever California does will set a pattern for the rest of the country. We need serious regulation, not pats on the head.”

Journalism is not just in decline locally. It's a national epidemic. Twenty years from now, a declining president may not be under enough pressure to step down.