# News Desert

> News Desert is mapped as the signal: it selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:media-information:news-desert` |
| Family | Media & Information Power |
| Domain | Information |
| Kind | mechanism |
| Archetypal function | The Signal |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

News Desert belongs to the **Media & Information Power** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

News Desert selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use News Desert, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Signal.** News Desert is mapped as the signal: it selects, frames, verifies, amplifies, distracts, and archives political reality.

## Gift

makes distant action public and enables accountability; through News Desert, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

rewards outrage, ownership power, propaganda, and attention capture; News Desert can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use News Desert to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Signal enters through News Desert. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when News Desert becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**resource.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to News Desert; another player names a countermove. Initiative 3.

## Relationships

- **constrains — Press Freedom:** Press Freedom constrains News Desert by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **legitimizes — Fact-Checking:** News Desert legitimizes Fact-Checking by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **amplifies — Collective Punishment:** News Desert amplifies Collective Punishment by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **depends on — Mass Deportation:** Mass Deportation depends on News Desert by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read News Desert from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if News Desert is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of News Desert: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Guidance for Regulation of Digital Platforms](https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387339) — UNESCO, 2023. Platform governance, expression, information integrity, and rights.
- [Church Committee Reports](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm) — U.S. Senate, 1975–1976. Investigations of intelligence abuses and subsequent oversight reforms.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
