If you don’t know what our local governments are up to, it’s your own fault. And the reasons you don’t know are part of a national trend that bodes ill for our republic.
I’m going to deviate from my usual coverage here because this problem is close to my heart. But fret not, there is a local angle!
My parents took us out of Cuba after Fidel Castro instituted a bloody dictatorship. When we came to America, my father read the newspaper every day and we argued politics over the dinner table. I continued that habit with my own daughters, both of whom followed me into journalism careers.
When I was growing up, my father was posted to Haiti, another dictatorship with no freedom of the press.
I became a journalist because I learned the quickest way to control a society was to deprive citizens of facts they need to govern their country. That’s what led Thomas Jefferson to opine, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspap…
