The crooks won't cry when newspapers die

Only the local paper performs the critical function of holding accountable the mayor, the governor, the local magnates and potentates, for how they spend your money, run your institutions, validate or violate your trust. If newspapers go, no other entity will have the wherewithal to do that.

By Leonard Pitts Jr

On the day the last newspaper is published, I expect no sympathy card from Kwame Kilpatrick. Were it not for a newspaper — The Detroit Free Press — his use of public funds to cover up his affair with one of his aides would be unrevealed and he might still be mayor of Detroit.

Nor will I expect flowers from Larry Craig. Were it not for a newspaper — The Idaho Statesman — we would not know of his propensity for taking a "wide stance" in airport men's rooms and he might still be serving in the U.S. Senate.

And I doubt there will be a toast of commiseration from Reynaldo Diaz and Oscar Rivero. Were it not for a newspaper — The Miami Herald — they would still be living large on money scammed from an agency that builds housing for the poor.

In short, the day the last newspaper is published — a day that seems to be rushing at us like a brick wall in an old Warner Bros. cartoon — I will not be surprised if the nation's various crooks, crumbs and corrupters fail to shed a tear.

But the unkindest cut of all, the "Et tu, Brute?" dagger in the back, is the fact that, according to a new survey from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, most other Americans won't, either. Pew found 63 percent of respondents saying that if their local paper went down, they would miss it very little or not at all.

It is the insult that compounds the injury, by which I mean the growing sense that we are working on the last major story of our lives and it is an obituary. Ours.

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