By Edward Lynn
Editor
The disappearance of local newspapers is tied not only to less information, but to changes in how communities govern themselves and how residents view one another politically. And it can literally tear communities, and the families and friendships that make them up, apart. Which, when widespread enough, can tear a nation apart. We’ve been seeing this every night in our nightly newscasts, and all over social media, for years. And history shows us that when a nation tears apart, democracy dies, and freedom is lost.
And when it comes to corruption, recent research summarized by the London School of Economics’ Business Review reports a clear pattern in federal prosecutions after major closures: in districts where a major daily newspaper closed, researchers found “a 7.3 per cent increase in the number of cases filed” involving corruption-related charges. The authors argue closures may embolden wrongdoing by reducing the perceived risk of being exposed by local reporting.
On public costs and oversight, a Brookings investigation into newspaper closures and public finance links the loss of monitoring to significantly higher municipal borrowing costs and describes newspapers as playing “an important monitoring role for local governments.”
Political division is also part of the documented fallout. A PBS NewsHour report states that researchers say the journalism crisis “is fueling the country’s political divisions,” describing communities that lost their papers and the resulting informational vacuum.
The mechanism is straightforward: when local reporting disappears, residents often consume more national political content, which tends to emphasize partisan conflict. Meanwhile, fewer shared local facts circulate about budgets, schools, infrastructure and public safety — the civic basics that typically bring people together around practical problem-solving.
In that environment, corruption becomes easier to hide, and polarization becomes easier to sustain: less scrutiny for officials, less reliable information for voters, and fewer common reference points for neighbors trying to argue about the same reality.
