The Outstater
Journalism ‘by Answering the Phone’
“The next 10 to 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.” — David Simon in 2009, crime reporter and creator of HBO’s “The Wire.”
A NEW STUDY warns that without a newspaper your town is more vulnerable to corruption.
Brad Greenwood, a Notre Dame graduate and a former student of our adjunct Barry Keating, has done a masterful job delineating the challenges facing local newspapers in his study, “No News Is Bad News.” He and a co-author identified 65 daily newspapers that closed from 1996 to 2018. They then compared the trends in federal corruption charges filed in U.S. district court across districts that did and did not experience the loss of a daily newspaper.
“The results were unambiguous,” Greenwood writes. “All else being equal, the closure of a newspaper yielded a 6.9 percent increase in corruption charges, a 6.8 percent increase in the number of indicted defendants and a 7.4 percent increase in cases filed.”
Interestingly, whether or not the newspaper was also distributed via the Internet did not make a difference. And researchers found that after a newspaper closes, prosecutors were more likely to offer plea deals rather than open their cases to a public trial. Officialdom, apparently, can lose the habit of transparency pretty quickly.
The study leaves the unintended impression that the presence of investigative reporters makes the difference. It may be simpler than that. In fact, today’s corporate owners have been able to marshal more journalistic clout than ever before. Usually, though, it is aligned only along narrow politically correct paths. Small proprietary papers, on the other hand, have racked up impressive records on a broader range of topics with only minimal staffs.
Most small and pmid-sized newsrooms, the bulwark of classic American journalism, have no investigative function worthy of the name. Rather, they are organized as mundane desks and beats — a cop shop, an obituary desk, church goings-on, arts/society, real estate transfers, marriages/divorces, hospital records, little-league sports, club news, the day-to-day stuff.
How does that dampen corruption? Trust over time, that’s how. The routine daily beat reporting builds confidence over the years in a paper’s ability to provide dependable, accurate news. Moreover, that trust is dependent on ongoing local ownership, over several generations, and not on revolving corporate managers.
Such a relationship between owner and reader establishes an atmosphere that discourages corruption. There is reasonable certainty that somebody is going to eventually tell the publisher of wrong-doing and the newspaper can be trusted to try its best to get to the bottom of it. You can call it “Journalism by Answering the Phone.”
I have two examples, a big one and a small one.
The Washington Post, a family-owned newspaper (albeit a large one) with longtime ties to many federal agencies, broke the Watergate story not with its roomful of gimlet-eyed investigative reporters but with a call to a thumbsucker from a suburban bureau, one with only six months journalism experience.
The second was at my first newspaper. One of my jobs was to visit the county recorder’s office and pick up the real estate transfers — an exercise carried out each weekday for the 100 years the paper had been publishing. One day I got a call from the recorder’s office to come by and look at a map. Somebody was buying up all the land in the south part of the county.
With the help of a friend, a science teacher, we noted the acreage, the distance from population centers and the proximity to a suitable water supply and correctly guessed (pre-Grok) that it was the state’s first nuclear plant. We scooped the two nearby metropolitan papers. It wasn’t corruption per se but it was certainly state and federal officials trying to keep a secret from the local citizenry.
For both tips came from longtime relationships between local officials and local newspapers. You have noticed that the key word in all of this is “longtime.” Again, nobody takes a corporate publisher seriously who cycles out every five years, and an estimated 80 percent of dailies are so managed and so owned.
To wrap this up, there is a way to encourage newspapers — the good kind, the local proprietary dailies. You treat them as critical elements in the design of our constitutional republic, one of the guardians of our civic well-being. If James Madison is any judge, the founders would have preferred a monarchy had they had thought the press would cease to be free. And by “encourage,” I don’t mean allowing special interests to subsidize specialty reporters (global warming, social justice, etc.). That is a form of corruption in itself.
Rather, exempting them from taxes and intrusive regulations, including their Internet manifestations, seems appropriate for a constitutional endowed institution. Subscriptions and display advertising fees can be treated as tax-deductible donations. Allow generous depreciation of equipment and real estate, offer tax credits for media investments, job creation and digital transformation. Exempt local publishers from inheritance taxes. Finally, if you don’t want to give them non-profitable status, consider giving them barely profitable status, which, alas, describes most these days.
With a quarter of American newspapers disappearing since 2004, what do we have to lose? — tcl
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