The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Will politicians grow more crooked if newspapers dwindle in number and influence?

How good are news­pa­pers as corruption-fighters or –pre­ven­ters? As noted in The Brass Check, a Chicago Tri­bune reporter actu­ally tried to dis­credit The Jun­gle, Upton Sin­clair’s fic­tion­al­ized depic­tion of the Chicago Stock­yards. Fairly or not, one sur­vey found that four-fifths of Amer­i­cans do not believe most of what’s in the New York Times—per­haps not so sur­pris­ing, con­sid­er­ing that Dar­win hasn’t done that well, either. In The Solomon Scan­dals, I myself write about a news­pa­per that cov­ers up for a local real estate tycoon, a builder of rick­ety high rises.

Just the same, I’d agree with Eduardo Porter’s com­men­tary in the Times, What News­pa­pers Do, Have Done and Will Do. “Gov­ern­ments in India pro­vide more pub­lic food and dis­as­ter relief in hard times in states where news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion is higher,” Porter sums up one aca­d­e­mic study. Fur­ther­more: “Clau­dia Goldin and Edward Glaeser of Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and Matthew Gentzkow of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago found that between 1870 and 1920, the share of polit­i­cal dailies that claimed to be inde­pen­dent rose from 11 per­cent to between 40 per­cent and 60 per­cent. Cor­rup­tion, mea­sured by an index of arti­cles men­tion­ing the topic in The Times, plum­meted by four-fifths over this period.”

A cause-effect rela­tion­ship? I think so, even though the Porter arti­cle does not flesh one out. If news­pa­pers fade away—both on paper and the Internet—could new kinds of online activ­i­ties replace them entirely? I’m skep­ti­cal. I don’t think that foundation-supported efforts and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists can serve as full sub­sti­tutes for the rig­or­ous, sus­tained scrutiny that politi­cians require, even when they’re revered. Some brief thoughts on that topic, among many oth­ers, appear in The Jonathan Stone-David Roth­man Q&A.

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