Support Local Journalism
In my past life, I was a journalist for Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC Europe, and NPR station WUSF in Tampa. This was all before I married my husband, so it was under my previous name: Kimberly Vlach.
The free press is the Fourth Estate. The first three are: The Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch. All four are necessary for there to be checks and balances.
The reporter is the person in the forest where the tree falls. If there were no reporter, there’d be no sound.
Remember in 2020 when the Riley County Board of Commissioners spent $852,000 on a church without even walking through it before signing the dotted line?
I was at this meeting. In fact, it was I who went to the podium to press the commissioners on this little nugget of important information:
They didn’t bother walking through the $852,000 church before spending our tax dollars on buying it.
That’s right.
And had it not been for an outside set of eyes and ears in that room to bring this to light, we’d be none the wiser.
And this, folks, is why local journalism is important.
Right now, we are in an information vacuum. I know that seems silly to say when we are all constantly bombarded with information.
But we’re all inundated with information at the national level and very little at the state or local level. That’s a problem when our lives are most affected by the government closest to our driveways.
If we’re paying attention to only national headlines, then it makes it all too easy for deceit and dishonesty to go unchecked.
Journalists are not the enemy. In fact, they are a crucial part of our democracy. For without them, we will have lost our ears in that forest.