Newspapers and Government, Sittin' in a Tree...

In the world of print journalism in general and newspapering in particular, there has been much hand-wringing lately about steadily declining circulation numbers. Many explanations have been offered, from the explosion of television news to the growth of news Web sites. But Jon Ham, the publisher of Carolina Journal, offers a novel explanation this week: Newspapers, he says, love government too much. "Newspaper reporters and editors have always covered the public sector," he writes. "But while they used to cover it as a preventative to corruption and abuse of power, they now cover it as a partner in the effort to get government more involved in people's lives. Implicit in government coverage these days are that non-defense government programs are good and the more people are attached to some government program, the better society will be." This strikes me as a dubious argument at best. Maybe it's because I'm not the least biased observer, given that all of the journalism we do at Government Executive is centered around the subject of what government does. Or maybe it's because of the regular knee-jerk skewering virtually every federal program takes in the nation's papers as being rife with corruption, waste and mismanagement.