No reporters in DC to watch the government

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Who's watching our government? Not Washington news bureaus

[snipped]

The fact that newspapers have been cutting staff recently comes as no surprise to most. It's happening in many other industries too as they try to weather the economic downtown.

But staffing of news bureaus in Washington D.C. seems to have been hit the hardest. Faced with the need to cut, management sees reporters in far-off places as more expendable than those covering stories in their home town.

[snipped]

... everyone in the Midwest and in the rest of the country still assumes that the D.C. media is keeping an eye on the federal government.

Her message: There's no one there.

She said D.C. is suffering a double whammy. Not only is no one doing the watchdog reporting, but there isn't much beat reporting happening either.

[snipped]

... we have many reasons to maintain sources in the nation's capital. But covering news as it pops up is nothing like covering news that results from good reporting and asking hard questions.

Sitting here half a nation away, it is not always possible to watch what our elected officials and bureaucrats are doing and stop them and ask why?

It is even harder to go digging into records and doing the kind of watchdog reporting that since the days of Watergate has been a hallmark of the press corps in Washington. All someone has to do to seriously delay, or pull the plug on a story, is not return phone calls or e-mails.

Frankly, among the "reporters" who are left, it seems they are often caught up reporting the celebrity of politics, the press conferences and canned sound bytes, as opposed to digging for real news.

[snipped]

Those of us back home should be scared to death that no one is keeping an eye on our government in Washington D.C. If you know people who don't read a newspaper, or their online sites and don't care if newspapers disappear, tell them they had better be careful what they wish for.

The core values of both the media and society are at stake here. If newspapers (and to a lesser extent broadcast media and bloggers) lose their teeth and no longer can be counted on to serve as our government watchdogs, then heaven help us.
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