"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall, or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers

"You do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at city hall, or in the courthouse hallways, or in the bars where police officers gather..." But this is 2017, and most cities are one-newspaper towns, generally exhibiting close, mutually-protective relationships between commercial media and government decision-makers. I've seen major papers outright lie about events in city council meetings and legislation (for two examples) when they thought nobody would hold them accountable. I've seen written accounts of speakers and audiences at city council meetings that the reporter didn't even attend. (And if you search online, you may well find independent reporting "gadfly" groups or individuals you didn't know existed -- the local commercial media sure wouldn't tell you. Nextdoor can also be useful, but the signal-to-noise ratio is often low.) One example process: local governments dish out taxpayer money to pseudo-independent "service organizations". Those organizations use part of these funds to buy advertising in local media and on public transit agencies. Those media, in turn, do flowery reporting on those local governments and soft-pedal police violence and union corruption, resulting in situations like "The Riders" in the Oakland Police Department[0]. This is too often the circle of modern urban "journalism". And that's without even addressing the issue of predatory corporate behavior by publishers themselves[1]. The broader point: modern, for-profit media are exactly that -- for-profit businesses. Their fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value. Objectivity and honesty are orthogonal to short- and medium-term profit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_v._City_of_Oakland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_v._City_of_Oakland [1] http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.29.97/spanish-press-9722.html http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.29.97/spanish-pre...