The winner: Miss Information; The loser: Us

By GottaLaff

All those newspapers closing down and/or cutting back is bad news (no pun) for everyone. The unfortunate result is that the crown is going to Miss Information. What exactly are we missing? What aren't we hearing? What don't we know? Too much:

Political consultants aren't exactly rubbing their hands together and snickering. But as the hired guns look over a landscape of closing newspapers and laid-off investigative reporters, they sense an opening that leaves them both excited and queasy.

One operative told me this week about planting attacks on opponents in partisan blogs, knowing the stories could bleed into mainstream news outlets, without leaving any incriminating fingerprints. Another described how he got green reporters to write stories (no campaign cash wasted!) on ads that the candidate had no intention of ever paying to put on TV.

"They don't know any better," the consultant chuckled. "So we can get away with that one again."

Gulp.

"Imagine driving along [Interstate] 5. There used to be a couple highway patrolmen to keep people in line. Now they're gone and everyone knows it," said Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic consultant. "It can devolve into a Mad Max situation pretty quickly."

Dan Schnur, a one-time Republican consultant who directs USC's Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics:

"Technology and blogs and the like make it much easier to get information out," he said. "But what is missing is the credibility that comes with that message coming through the mainstream media."

The "mainstream media"aren't exactly reliable or unbiased, but let's move along...

Newspapers [havd] slashed their staffs, often losing the most experienced (and highest-paid) reporters, because of a ghastly recession and advertising lost to the Internet.

The severity of the problem is hard to assess. How do you get your arms around what hasn't been written? [...]

Wouldn't a more robust reporting corps have delved by now into gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman's stock trades when she headed EBay? [...] [I]n the old days, one operative said, someone would have checked by now. [...]

One political consultant told me he regularly encounters less-experienced (and more easily bamboozled) reporters when he works on state and congressional campaigns. He was the one who told me the newbies often didn't bother to check whether ads were really going to have any serious presence on television. The net effect: He got thousands of dollars worth of "free" media, exposing the public to ads the politician would never pay to put on the air. [...]

Yet I fear much of this is lost on the public. I don't know whether to be depressed or infuriated by the folks who occasionally e-mail me, gleeful that another newspaper will cut its staff. [...]

What political and news veterans feel in their guts, a couple of Princeton economists said they have confirmed.

The two researchers found that, after the Cincinnati Post closed at the end of 2007, fewer candidates participated in local elections, incumbents had a greater advantage and voter turnout declined [...] Politics in suburban northern Kentucky communities became less "vibrant" for the loss of that single paper, despite the fact that its 27,000 daily circulation was dwarfed by the city's dominant Cincinnati Enquirer.

Here's hoping the new websites and community blogs that we keep hearing about will pick up the slack some time soon. In the meantime, the political pros have more control. And we have less information. Some folks seem to have no idea what they're missing.

Miss Information wins. Not even runners-up: Accurate and thorough reporting. Coming in last: An informed public. That glued-on smile on Miss Congeniality's (aka Democracy) face? It's fading.