Comment by potato3732842
2 days ago
The problem with "one guy" is the potentially high standard deviation. The one guy can potentially be a careerist good old boy club protecting special interest facilitating jerk in the same way that any of the dozens of the barely accountable bureaucrats in your town can be.
I'd still prefer that "one guy" if the alternative is nothing. My Ontario town has a similar character. Lord knows he has his biases, but frequently the alternative to a loud curmudgeon is just no accountability at all.
Accountability to whom and on what axis? My city's apparent "we're poor AF and can't in good conscience say yes to any boondoggle expenditure or no to anyone who wants to invest anything" soft policy is a Karen's nightmare.
In this case, I meant accountability to the municipal tax payer.
Most people just don't have the time or motivation to read town council notes or attend meetings, just having one person in town who's willing to bring these topics to the public square (Facebook, usually) is often a net positive.
Totally agree though, this mechanism is far from foolproof.
If one guy can make it, then another guy could probably too. That's how cities used to have sometimes 3 or 4 competing papers.
My town as two newspapers and two TV new stations. They employ more than a dozen journalists, including an old friend of mine.
If you want any actual important news, you go to Facebook and make sure that you’re following the right people and you’re in the right groups, because that’s where the news about local governance and politics actually comes out. The papers and TV stations almost always run bland human interest stories, business propaganda, press release reprints, a huge selection of national and sports news, etc. a few years ago, both papers announced they wouldn’t report most local crimes anymore unless they were particularly notorious.
After a few months or sometimes years if a local story has become big enough, they’ll deign to cover it, usually without crediting the people who actually broke the story to everyone paying attention.
When local professional journalism is this bad, it’s nobody’s fault but them whe nobody wants to pay for it.