Two years ago this month, the Oklahoman and Tulsa World announced a content-sharing agreement in which each paper would carry some stories created by the other. The papers also said they would “focus on reducing some areas of duplication, such as sending reporters from both The Oklahoman and the Tulsa World to cover routine news events.” With the agreement, the Capitol Bureau staffs of the two papers, which had consisted of six reporters a short time earlier, was pared down to three.

For many observers, this shrinking press pool of the state’s two major dailies marked another key moment in the erosion, and potential disappearance, of state political news coverage. According to a 2009 article in the Oklahoma Gazette (unavailable online), the Capitol press corps, which at its peak in 1977 counted 39 reporters, now numbers in the teens.  Smaller papers have eliminated their Capitol reporter positions, TV news stations (other than OETA) cover the Legislature only intermittently, if at all, and even the Associated Press has cut back its staff.  While a small nucleus of experienced, committed Capitol reporters remain, the ongoing capacity of the media to go beyond rewriting press releases and provide Oklahoma with in-depth, informed reporting on public affairs seemed very much in doubt. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month I gave a presentation to a meeting of the State Chamber of Commerce along with a representative from another state policy organization.  I was struck, and frankly dismayed, by the extent to which my co-presenter  spoke as if government and the private sector were opposing forces pitted against one another in a  zero-sum competition. In this view, taxes assessed on businesses and households extract dollars away from productive consumption and investment in the private sector in order to “grow government”.

It is certainly true that a vibrant private sector will always be the main engine of economic growth in a capitalist economy. Public spending can at times crowd out private investment, although, as economists like Brad DeLong argue, during times of sluggish economic growth like the present,  government spending can be vital for keeping the economy from grinding to a halt and for incentivizing private investment. But more fundamentally, this polarizing conception of “government versus the private sector” misses the important ways in which businesses, as well as families and communities, cannot thrive without a strong and effective public sector. You cannot have a vibrant, productive private sector without state and local government helping to: Read the rest of this entry »