… perhaps they need to be reminded that, as citizens, graft and corruption are as damaging for them as it is for real citizens. Here’s Margaret Sullivan of WaPo with a graphic example of what we’re losing as local newspapers sink into the sea of insolvency:
I spent some time with Bertram de Souza, the paper’s editorial page editor, who had been at the Vindicator [now shuttered] for 40 years. As a reporter, he helped reveal the corruption of James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to prison in 2002 after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes and using his staff to do chores at his home and on his houseboat. Youngstown “is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” de Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” The problem, going forward, is that when it comes to revealing malfeasance, you don’t know what you don’t know: If there’s no one to keep public officials honest, citizens might never find out how their faith is being broken and their tax dollars squandered.
Or new business suppressed, or enemies at contemporary businesses attacked from the castle of a corrupt government. As Sullivan points out later in the article, a free press subsisting on government subsidies isn’t a healthy relationship.
Back in the heyday of newspapers, while readers were expected to pay for access to the gathered news, that wasn’t the primary source of income for the newspaper. Advertising paid the bills, advertising mainly paid for by local businesses.
Today, the Web and email permit businesses to bypass the newspaper, and I do not doubt they save scads of money by doing so. But the cost to the community, of which they are a part, puts that community more and more at risk of becoming a toxic swamp rather than a source of profit. Can your local car repair shop, 3M, Cargill, the grocery store, and the local model train club all survive in an environment in which the government is corrupt? Where corporations had better contribute to the reelection fund, or face possible extinction?
I’m not necessarily suggesting that the local business community find a way to support the free press, although I think it’s a strong contender. I cannot help but wonder if it’s possible to extract the job of investigating government into some other entity, again supported by local business, that can investigate, without bias, the local and national government as necessary.
But newspapers do seem to be the natural residence of such investigators. And I think that business, having once had a critical role in funding the investigators, had better consider assuming that role again.
