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In 2009, David Simon, the creator of HBO’s The Wire and a onetime crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, told a Senate subcommittee that as America’s regional newspapers collapsed, corruption would flourish. “The next ten to fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption,” he said. “It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.”
Sixteen years later, it seems like an opportune time to take stock of that prediction. After all, the decline of the local newspaper has continued relentlessly in the intervening years, with more than a quarter of American newspapers disappearing since 2004. Along with my coauthor Ted Matherly, then of Northeastern University, I published a paper in June of last year exploring this question: Has the disappearance of local and regional newspapers given local officials the green light to engage in corruption?
Our focus was on the closure of sixty-five major daily newspapers—the sort that would have the resources to conduct serious investigative journalism—from 1996 to 2018. We then compared the trends in federal corruption charges filed in US district court across districts that did and did not experience the loss of a major daily newspaper. The results were unambiguous. All else being equal, the closure of a newspaper yielded a 6.9 percent increase in corruption charges, a 6.8 percent increase in the number of indicted defendants, and a 7.4 percent increase in cases filed.
Importantly, we leveraged a statistical technique called a difference-in-differences design, the goal of which is to tease out causation, not mere correlation. That means we compared the change in corruption rates across federal court districts once we had controlled for potential confounding factors—such as economic conditions or the relative size of the district—leaving the main residual difference being the loss of the newspaper. What’s more, we performed a follow-up study in the same paper using a similar approach with data from Brazil, which also lost sixty-five daily newspapers from 2011 to 2021. Two countries, the same pattern.
To be sure, newspapers are not the end-all, be-all of reporting. In many communities, news blogs and citizen-journalist websites have filled the void left by disappearing local papers, but we found they didn’t have a meaningful impact on corruption rates. To test this, we measured the impact of online outlets, ranging from high-quality nonprofit organizations to hyper-local news blogs like Patch, on corruption rates. But it didn’t change, or even attenuate, the main result: corruption cases went up regardless. From the standpoint of corruption prevention, the impact of these outlets was negligible.
Our research couldn’t tell us exactly why the loss of local newspapers contributed to this uptick in corruption—but we have some theories. One possibility, of course, is simply that serious news outlets are more likely to have reporters who put in the legwork—showing up to town hall meetings, tracking down public officials—that could lead to revelations about abuses of power. Our best attempts to assess this, including a statistical analysis of the number of Freedom of Information Act requests, or of news articles mentioning state and government officials, found no meaningful connection with the rate of corruption cases.
We did, however, find some evidence that the presence of local newspapers affects how prosecutors treat corruption cases inside the courtroom. Specifically, we saw that after a newspaper closure, prosecutors were more likely to offer plea deals rather than take corruption cases to trial. This suggests that newspapers may play an important role in elevating the public profile of corruption cases—perhaps by sustaining pressure on prosecutors to see them through, or by maximizing public awareness of the case. It’s possible these choices may also cause corrupt officials to falsely assume that, in the absence of a newspaper, their acts of corruption will go undetected.
Obviously, the ultimate import of our findings remains somewhat mysterious. More research is needed to pin down the ways in which local journalism actually deters corruption. But our paper has largely shown that a strong local press is an important part of how society holds off public corruption.
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