Tag Archives: newspapers

The Decline of Small Newspapers Means Higher Risk of Local Corruption in the U.S.

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There is widespread consensus that a free, objective press plays an important role in fighting corruption and holding public officials accountable (see here, here, and here). That’s why, when countries with high levels of public corruption seek to silence investigative journalists or shutter unbiased news outlets, anticorruption organizations like Transparency International are vocal in their opposition. It’s a bit surprising, then, that so little has been said about how the decline of small newspapers in the United States has increased the risk of local corruption.

The decline of small newspapers in the United States has been precipitous. Between 2004 and 2018, there was a net loss of nearly 1,800 papers, over 1,000 of which had circulations under 5,000. Today, around half of all counties in the United States only have one local newspaper, often circulating only on a weekly basis, while nearly 200 counties don’t have a single newspaper—resulting in “news deserts,” defined as communities “with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots levels.” Furthermore, in many of the small- and medium-circulation outlets that remain, newsrooms have been gutted, often due to layoffs imposed by their parent companies. For example, Digital First Media, a publisher that owns more than 50 newspapers, has eliminated two-thirds of all newspaper staff since 2011.  Between 2001 and 2016, employment in the U.S. newspaper industry decreased by more than 50%.

The decline of small newspapers is just one component of a shifting media landscape in the United States. Some of the other trends, like the rise of social media and the proliferation of unverified and sometimes apocryphal online new sources, have been at the center of political discourse. The decline of small newspapers, on the other hand, is often lamented as a regrettable casualty of changing times, but there isn’t enough appreciation of the fact that the decline of small newspapers poses a risk of increased local corruption. Continue reading →

Do People Care More About Corruption Than They Used To? Evidence from the US and Germany

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Sometimes it feels like corruption has become the topic of the year: We’ve heard repeatedly that it is (the perception of) corrupt elites that has fueled the rise of populists, nationalists, and new socialist parties and politicians. The most prominently of these, though not the only one, is Donald Trump, who promised in his campaign to take back power from the corrupt elites (see here and here).

But has the topic of corruption actually become increasingly prominent in popular and media discourse over the last two years? To investigate this question, I did a simple search on the Factiva database within the eight most widely-circulated American newspapers (USA Today, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and Newsday) for the term “corruption.” I did a similar search for Germany, using the term “Korruption” and the eight most widely-circulated German newspapers (BILD, BILD am Sonntag, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Rheinische Post, Welt am Sonntag and Rheinische Post). Surprisingly (at least to me), over the last two years there was no growth in U.S. newspaper reporting on corruption. As the following graph shows, reporting on corruption in the U.S. has been rather stable over this period, with between 500 and 750 articles a month. A slightly different picture emerges for Germany, where newspaper reports on corruption, which were substantially less frequent than in the U.S. to begin with, have actually declined over the past two years. (A side note, though perhaps an interesting one: The most reported corruption topic in both countries, with about 2.5 times more stories than the next-most-mentioned topic, was FIFA.): Continue reading →