“Is there going to be somebody to hold their feet to the fire?” That’s what Tim Bjerk wondered when the Warroad Pioneer ceased publication in May. For 121 years, the weekly paper had been a source of news in the northern Minnesota town, where Bjerk worked for the largest employer, Marvin, the window and door-making company.
The paper reported on town government and the local school board. It held their feet to the fire, so to speak.
With its demise, Bjerk’s fears are well founded.
A quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed over the past 15 years. This has left hundreds of communities without needed watchdogs. Studies have found that when news coverage declines or is eliminated, the accountability of government officials diminishes and the costs of government rise. In one California small town, for example, local officials raised their salaries 10-fold. Bell town manager Robert Rizzo owned a seaside mansion and horse ranch, while working for a town where the median household income was about $30,000 a year. Town officials approved the raises and other expenditures in brief meetings that were not attended by residents or the media.
After the Los Angeles Times investigated the situation and wrote about it, the Los Angeles County district attorney filed charges against eight town officials, alleging that they stole $5.5 million in public funds. Rizzo was charged with 53 felony counts, 44 of which pertain to misappropriation of Bell’s municipal coffers.
The closing of newspapers, and cutbacks at those that remain in business, “means not only fewer investigative stories, but, more commonly, less daily beat reporting about municipal government, schools, the environment, local businesses and other topics that impact Americans’ future, their safety, their livelihood, and their everyday life,” the Federal Communications Commission said in a 2011 report. “In very real ways, the dramatic newspaper-industry cutbacks appear to have caused genuine harm to American citizens and local communities.”
Without local media, residents turn to other outlets — often online and unverified — for their news.
Back in Warroad, Minnesota, former county commissioner Todd Miller told The New York Times he worried about the consequences of getting information from these other sources. “A lot of it is going to be word of mouth through kaffeeklatsches,” he said. “And who knows what variant of BS gets passed around there.”
This isn’t a theoretical worry. Late last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its first set of findings about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The committee report reiterated an earlier Department of Homeland Security assessment that systems in every state were “scanned.”
The committee said it saw no evidence that votes were changed or that voting machines were manipulated. But, the Russians didn’t need to actually change voting results to sow doubt and discord about the presidential election. That doubt and discord continues today, fed by partisan social media posts and actual fake news, often from so-called trolls, who post things on the internet solely to further disagreements and fear.
In one example, Russian trolls, from a group linked to Putin, spread false information about supposed widespread food poisoning from turkeys on Thanksgiving 2015. The whole thing was a hoax with the goal of seeing how easy it would be to spread panic, experts concluded.
Such hoaxes are easier to perpetuate as journalism is diminished, yet the flow of electronic information — some of it accurate, much of it not — increases.
“The most important bulwark in the security of our elections are the voters themselves,” Secretary of State Matt Dunlap wrote in an Aug. 2 column in the Bangor Daily News. “Every voter should care enough to ask tough questions — of their election officials, security experts, the candidates and each other. They should be so prepared that no citizen can have their democracy undermined by a ghostwritten Facebook message or other deception.”
Newspapers, and other media, continue to play a critical role in separating fact from fiction and in keeping government accountable. But, as more and more communities become “news deserts,” it is becoming increasingly important for citizens to heed Dunlap’s advice.
