I had the privilege in mid-January to participate in a media panel in University Park, Maryland, with Marta McLellan Ross, the vice president of government and external affairs at NPR; Rafael Lorente, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school; Pete Pichaske, a former reporter and editor, and Kit Slack, who is doing some impressive hyper-local journalism in Prince George’s County as editor at Streetcar Suburbs Publishing.
An audience of about 40 local residents interacted with the panel on the importance of local journalism and the danger it is facing as newspapers shrink in size or disappear altogether.
I chose to focus on the experience more than a decade ago of Bell, California, a community of about 35,000 in Los Angeles County.
Bell, which is working class and largely Hispanic and Lebanese, was run by a group of leaders who illegally raised taxes and paid themselves outrageous salaries and perks. For example, the city manager had a salary of $800,000, plus several hundred thousand more in benefits.
When interviewed later, one of two reporters from the Los Angeles Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the scandal noted that in the old days more reporters were covering the county and regularly attended various council meetings. In the Bell case, he had received a tip regarding a criminal investigation, which spurred the coverage.
My question to the audience listening to our panel was: Are there 500 other communities where similar scandals are taking place right now that we don’t know about because no media outlet is serving as a government watchdog? It’s an important — and scary — concern that potentially affects all of us.
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