Back in April, I wrote a post about how local newspapers provided an important check on politicians handing out taxpayer funds to their cronies. I’ve written more recently about the challenge of American private sector workers ever being able to come up with enough taxes to pay for public employee pensions. There are a few recent Boston Globe stories that illustrate the value of a local newspaper in keeping the taxpayer informed:
- an October 22 story about Boston firefighter pensions (74 percent of retirees become disabled on the job, which entitles them to tax-free pensions; a majority were injured on a day when they happened to be filling in for a supervisor, which entitled them to a pension based on the salary of the person for whom they were filling in that day)
- a library trustee who earned almost $10,000 per hour (in pension benefits) for attending a few board meetings
- two public employees approve each others’ pensions (one got $63,000 per year… EXTRA)
What is upsetting about these stories is that you know the Globe’s small staff can’t possibly be finding more than the tip of the iceberg when it comes to state/local government abuse of the taxpayers.
So the death (or dearth, at least) of real, accountable news sources leads to another problem. Rather than arguing opinion and policy with my fellow citizens before I go to the polls, I’m left arguing facts. My fellow citizens could have precisely the same values and priorities as I do, but they will vote differently because they’re substantially differently informed. Honestly, this worries me even more than a trillion dollar deficit. You can recover from debt, albeit slowly and painfully, but when the news is gone, I’m not sure how you recover.
I had high (naive) hopes that blogs would evolve into a more legitimate news form, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. At least with the tech blogs, they all seem to pass along the same semi-manufactured story without anyone ever picking up a phone and checking a source. The political blogs cater to a particular audience and try to tell them what they want to hear, usually relying on newspapers to do the heavy lifting.
Now what? A reader of your blog suggested public funding of newspapers, but the problem there is obvious and I don’t think solvable.