I have a story to tell.
Late November in 2008 a gentleman by the name of Ray Sansom was elected speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Sansom, who represents the 4th District, a stone's throw from my hometown in the Florida Panhandle, was indicted last Friday by a grand jury for professional misconduct. Also indicted was Dr. Bob Richburg, the president of Northwest Florida State College, which - wouldn't you know it - happens to also be located in the 4th District.
Representative Sansom is no longer speaker of the House. He resigned from that position after only a month on the job when allegations arose that he had funneled more than $35 million of state money to NFSC. On the day he was sworn in as the speaker, he was also officially hired by NFSC as a vice president of development, a position with a $110,000 salary.
The indictment purported that Sansom's college salary was paid for by some of the $35 million he steered toward the campus at Niceville, Fla. How convenient!
In a time when all Florida colleges and universities, including UF, are having hard times making ends meet, NFSC was doing quite well.
Now, I tell that story to explain a much larger problem that's growing every day: The death of newspapers.
See, newspapers aren't doing so hot these days. The seemingly free information age has stolen advertising revenue at the hefty expense of newspapers. Who wants to advertise in the classifieds when there's Craigslist and eBay? The problem with relying on simply CNN or Fox News is that they don't have investigative journalists who will uncover potential misuse of power and other "professional misconduct" at the local level.
Sure, small newspapers may never have the capability or staff to launch exhaustive investigations into the cases of corruption, abuse of power and society's other marginalized stories, but more and more regional papers lack the resources to do so as well. Even when newspapers do launch investigations, the outcomes don't catch a local community's interest on the scale that a national scandal does.
We're becoming a society that's focusing more and more on the nation at large and less on the community we immediately inhabit. The information age has shrunk the world, has even made it flat, as veteran New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has argued, but by shrinking a large part of town and even state culture, much has been lost.
There is local news. I know it's hard to accept that fact when cable news channels endlessly drone on about Phil Spector, but there really is local news that affects every person's life. There are other Sansoms and Dr. Richburgs in Florida. Anyone who has grown up in a small Florida town most likely knows of a shady developer or two, and corrupt city council members and county commissioners do exist.
Of course the journalism industry will evolve. No one will allow credible local newsgatherers to simply disappear, but who will watch the Sansoms of the world in the meantime?
CNN and Fox News certainly aren't.
Matthew Christ is a political science freshman. His column appears on Mondays.
