I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.

Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.

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trevithick 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...

> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

	▲	lamasery 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show. I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.
	▲	PearlRiver 5 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Corruption is not new- in fact looking at US history it appeared to be the norm. Tammany Hall, railroad barons, the Prohibition, Standard Oil. There were just a brief few decades after WW2 when it slipped into the background.