"I am choosing to take heart at how media outlets are striving to report on local officials in an environment where local news is cratering."
How gratifying this must be for you. Out here in the Oklahoma panhandle we have no such luxury. In a State run in whatever way the OKGOP permanent monopoly on power sees fit, they clearly also have the local papers and news channels comfortably in their pockets. The abuses of power which go on routinely and in plain sight seldom become anything other than the stuff of toothless social-media gossip with no intent to do anything about them, when there is no remote possibility of any kind of realistic political opposition, and the local news venues, if they can even be called that, seem to have an actually hostile reaction to the idea that a free press must serve as a constraint upon the powers of officialdom by shedding light on them.
I'd be grateful if someone from this outfit were to contact me at either (580)461-6728 or framersqool@gmail.com, ask for Ron Collins, and hear me out, about some of the ridiculous and anti-constitutional shenanigans I've been watching these local-boss-system apparatchiks getting away with for years. Some of them have been aimed at me, and I've done my solitary and unfunded best to fight back, but I've mostly pretty much given up on the hope that proper investigative journalism, much less any readership disposed to listen to anything other than far-right talk-radio and college football scores, has ever been anything these podunk-fascists have ever needed to worry about.
"I am choosing to take heart at how media outlets are striving to report on local officials in an environment where local news is cratering."
How gratifying this must be for you. Out here in the Oklahoma panhandle we have no such luxury. In a State run in whatever way the OKGOP permanent monopoly on power sees fit, they clearly also have the local papers and news channels comfortably in their pockets. The abuses of power which go on routinely and in plain sight seldom become anything other than the stuff of toothless social-media gossip with no intent to do anything about them, when there is no remote possibility of any kind of realistic political opposition, and the local news venues, if they can even be called that, seem to have an actually hostile reaction to the idea that a free press must serve as a constraint upon the powers of officialdom by shedding light on them.
I'd be grateful if someone from this outfit were to contact me at either (580)461-6728 or framersqool@gmail.com, ask for Ron Collins, and hear me out, about some of the ridiculous and anti-constitutional shenanigans I've been watching these local-boss-system apparatchiks getting away with for years. Some of them have been aimed at me, and I've done my solitary and unfunded best to fight back, but I've mostly pretty much given up on the hope that proper investigative journalism, much less any readership disposed to listen to anything other than far-right talk-radio and college football scores, has ever been anything these podunk-fascists have ever needed to worry about.