By Stephen Kessler | Santa Cruz Sentinel August 20, 2022 at 7:00 a.m.
In the good old days when local newspapers could afford investigative reporters, the press served as a reality check on politicians’ power. In recent decades it’s all a local paper can do to report on meetings and official pronouncements, giving public officials the comforting impression that nobody’s keeping an eye on how they operate. Which leaves it up to mere commentators to look more closely at what they’re doing, and to make them uncomfortable.
Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.