The internet has upended local news production, introducing new media enterprises and eroding the ability of local outlets to provide investigative journalism. The capacity to monitor government officials, a core function of a free press, is reduced. Ted Matherly and Brad Greenwood write that corrupt actors might view the closure of their local newspaper as reducing the risk of discovery, making them more likely to engage in unscrupulous behaviour.
Corruption is a global scourge. It undermines the stability of prices, the ability to trade and the ability to modernise economies. A key function of the free press has been to serve as a watchdog of the public interest and a bulwark against such misconduct. Newspapers provide this service by vetting government officials prior to them entering official roles, by auditing their actions while they are in office and by publicising their misdeeds after they have been uncovered by law enforcement.
And while the rise of digital platforms has upended the news industry, proponents of the democratisation of the media have argued that citizen journalists might aid in the process of discovering corruption, thereby deterring would-be corrupt actors. After all, if everyone has a camera in their pocket, hiding these actions becomes much more difficult.
However, the digitisation of the news industry has also led to increased competition and tighter budgets. For a cash-strapped news organisation, the expense of investigative journalism is often first on the chopping block. Even worse, in many communities, newspapers have completely disappeared: since 2004, 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving two-thirds of US counties without a daily newspaper. This has already been shown to have damaging consequences, including negative effects on public sector financing and decreased prosecution of pollution. Given the “fourth estate” role of the news media as a check on government, it seems likely the hollowing out of professional investigative capacity could lead to an increase in corruption in the affected communities.
To investigate the effect of newspaper closure on corruption, we gathered data on the closure of 65 major US daily newspapers between 2006 and 2019 from the University of North Carolina’s news deserts database. The measurement of corruption is somewhat more difficult, however, as it is something that parties attempt to conceal. While some prior work has used survey-based measures, we draw on the US Attorney’s Central Charge File, which represents a census of all defendants in US federal court since 1996.
This data provides a consistent definition of corruption across the US through the cases brought by attorneys, with charges of bribery, theft of public money, wire fraud and so forth. We further interviewed current and former assistant US attorneys who reinforced the importance in their work of prosecuting corruption apolitically. They emphasised the high standards to which the pursuit of these cases was held. We identified 91,888 cases with charges typically associated with the prosecution of corruption, and we grouped these cases into the US district courts to which they were assigned.
Our analysis uses a difference-in-difference design. We compare districts that experienced a major newspaper closure to those that didn’t, while accounting for differences between them prior to these closures. We found that in districts where a major daily newspaper closed, there was a 7.3 per cent increase in the number of cases filed. These effects were not due to changes in the cohort of elected officials, nor due to changes in the coverage of government officials within the newspaper. This implies that the increase is not driven by the vetting or auditing functions of newspapers. The results suggested that corrupt officials may be emboldened by the closure, only to be ensnared by federal law enforcement. We supplemented these findings by replicating the results in Brazil, where we see a similar increase in corruption following closures of newspapers.
Figure 1. Corruption cases increase following newspaper closures
In the years after a major daily newspaper closes, there is a steady rise in corruption cases prosecuted in the corresponding US Federal Court district.
Given these outcomes, an important question for policymakers is what can be done to address this rise in corruption in the absence of journalistic eyes. A variety of new digital newsvendors have opened during this time, which could potentially offset this loss. These include high quality outlets, including nonprofit reporting centres and other digital-only news organisations, as well as lower-quality “pink slime” websites that imitate local news outlets, along with locally focused news aggregators such as Patch.com. When investigating if these news vendors had any effects, we found no association between their opening and the number of corruption cases. All of this is to suggest that the rise of citizen journalism has little material effect on the rise of corruption that follows the closure of the professional press.
Our results highlight an important role of the news media in society: providing a check on the potential for government officials to use their positions illicitly. It’s also worth noting that our estimates for the change in corruption also likely underestimate the overall effect, as the use of federal prosecution data means that we only observe those cases in which US attorneys had “a good faith belief” that the prosecution would succeed in court. As the general business forces of the industry have led to consolidation and a focus on national news, there is an urgent need for local policymakers to incentivise local journalism, facilitated by the tools and information available through digitisation. Further, newsvendors would do well to investigate ways to collaborate effectively and find efficiencies, while keeping local ears to the ground and their watchful eyes on council meetings.
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- This blog post is based No News is Bad News: The Internet, Corruption, and the Decline of the Fourth Estate, MIS Quarterly.
- The post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Featured image provided by Shutterstock
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Strong research in evidence here. It seems that that customers of local papers place value the product for other reasons, and the out the baby with the bathwater. Wasn’t it really in the publisher’s hands to market their investigative skills to their served-market?
This comment was interesting; “Newspapers provide this service by vetting government officials prior to them entering official roles”. I suspect that many prospective readers sense a bias in the “vetting”, which at least in the seven states I’ve lived in are largely ideologically driven. We have elections which allows each candidate to vet the other. This doesn’t happen in unopposed elections of course which are common in some states, where people are elected by virtue of a primary alone – because the “D or the R” will always win.
This study treats the closure of a newspaper as a discrete, one time event. In reality, readership declines over time, and newsrooms decline accordingly – over time. The trend line doesn’t reflect this, which defies that sniff test. I would expect the rise to occur prior to closing as well. The local paper in my town simply does “scrapes” of the local police web site, along with State level activity involving local crimes.
I’m always alert to studies which use correlation to describe causation. In this case we could say that local papers were lousy at finding corruption as evidenced by the increase in prosecutions after their closure.
The decline of local newspapers creates a vacuum that allows corruption to flourish unchecked. Strong local journalism is essential for holding power accountable and maintaining a healthy democracy.