The Epic Wave of Political Corruption on America's Horizon

Much has been made about the potential for vast corruption emerging from Obama's hastily constructed economic stimulus package and how the funds are allocated to various jurisdictions. While I certainly fear that presumption will prove correct, it's not my primary source of concern. My primary concern is the fast-disappearing print media which is likely to shrink dramatically further in the internet age.

The media in general is a favorite whipping boy of people of all political stripes, particularly conservatives, so it's not surprising that many are getting a cheap thrill watching America's print media giants going the way of the mastadon...or the way of General Motors for that matter. Few seem to be considering the implications of losing the print media, or else retort with shallow snarks about print media no longer being relevant in the internet age.

The obvious problem with that mindset is that most of the news we see online is simply regurgitated from official print news sources. Matt Drudge and other bloggers are dependent upon inside sources from the existing media apparatus to fill their blogs. If correspondents within Old Media are standing in the unemployment line rather than pursuing stories, pajama-wearing New Media sources will become very lonely sitting in their parents' basements waiting for the news to come to them.

But let's say for the sake of argument that enough existing news sources remain in the business even in the aftermath of the print media's extinction and "mainstream" news events get the same caliber of coverage and the same level of journalistic scrutiny as they always have. Even in that best-case scenario, there's still one serious question left unresolved. Who covers City Hall?

The Drudges of the New Media serve a national and international audience interested in big-ticket news events. Partisans of the New Media can probably be counted upon to dig for whatever dirt they can on high-profile political figures at the federal and even the state level, but will bloggers be at all interested in investigative journalism against the Chillicothe, Ohio, city government? Or the Dougherty County, Georgia, county commissioners? Once local print media outlets in those places go away, and it certainly looks as though they will, how likely is it that any bloggers will fill the void? And as soon as local government officials realize there's nobody keeping tabs on their conduct, how many billions of dollars of taxpayer money can we expect to be pilfered in the wave of corruption that ensues?

These are questions I intend to pose to every smug ignoramus who laughs off the pending collapse of print media.