Sacramento needs to fix state's truth decay

California has a problem.

- MARK Z. BARABAK COLUMNIST

THE Santa Barbara News-Press is one of the California newsrooms to close; a nonprofit is working to revive it.

(MEL MELCON Los Angeles Times)

It's not homelessness, a lack of housing or the state's increasing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at length.It's truth decay.

If you believe that information is the taproot of knowledge and expanding personal vistas is key to learning, there's a case to be made that the great Golden State — quietly, with scant notice — is growing more impoverished by the day.

In the last quarter of a century, a third of California newsrooms have closed.

Nearly 7 in 10 journalists have lost their jobs.

The relentlessly cruel economics of the news business, driven in good part by the voracious profiteering of monoliths such as Google and Facebook, has devastated the industry — including the newsroom that employs your friendly columnist — drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the rest of the country, vastly worse off.

There's an information vacuum and that space is filling up with garbage.

Increasingly, the daily diet of “news” that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely style themselves as prophets of the unvarnished truth.

(If you genuinely can’t differentiate between news and commentary, such as this, or between those making an honest attempt to present a fair, all-things-considered account of events versus someone shaving, eliding and shoehorning facts to fit a predetermined narrative, here’s a suggestion: Save time, skip the rest of this column and turn to the sports or comics pages.)

Not long ago, California took a baby step toward addressing this rampant decay.

Now, even that tiny effort is tottering.