Read This Now - Newspapers' Decline Fosters Police State

Much has been made of the decline and fall of the daily newspaper of late, with several large papers recently closing up shop (RIP Rocky Mountain News) and many others streamlining and otherwise cutting back.

David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of The Wire, outlined one of the consequences of downsized and disappearing daily papers in the Washington Post last Sunday:

Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit -- these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

You should read it.