Bell, California

Might Barcelona be better served by its newspapers than Los Angeles, whose metropolitan area more than doubles that of Barcelona in population? Los Angeles has one metropolitan daily; Barcelona has four. The L.A. Times daily circulation comes to over 600,000, relative to a local population (that of L.A. County) of nearly 10 million. The four Barcelona dailies--La Vanguardia (235,000), El Periódico (180,000), Avui (37,000), and El Punt (30,000)--give Barcelona three quarters the number of daily newspapers in circulation as Los Angeles in absolute terms, relative to a local population of 5.5 million in the province of Barcelona. To the figure for the L.A. Times one would have to add both the L.A. circulation of USA Today and dailies that target smaller markets within the country, such as the L.A. Daily News and La Opinión. Similarly, for Barcelona one would have too add the circulation of a half dozen Madrid dailies which publish Barcelona sections or supplements in their local editions.

This issue suggested itself when, in L.A. County, the Times blew the whistle on city officials in Bell, a municipality of about 36,000 to the south and east of downtown.  Like Lester Freamon of The Wire, two Times journalists followed a paper trail: what they found was a +$1.5-million salary, a string of +$400,000 salaries, and a political clique that had been lining its collective pocket as best it could for six years. Obfuscation and loopholes had kept citizens in the dark. A print medium did its job, found the dirt, ran the exposé, and heads--a lot of heads--began to roll. The city is now run by an interim administration.

Perhaps a dozen place names in L.A. County are familiar to movie-goers all over the world. Bell is not among them. Bell is poor, largely Hispanic, and prone to lower voter turnouts: 400 people voted in a plebiscite which gave the now disgraced officials the loophole they needed to circumvent state law and get rich quick. Now that transparency and accountability have returned to Bell, they key question is why they were absent for so long.

The classic source of scrutiny in a liberal democracy is the press. In Bell, it took the press six years to expose the rot. Would it have taken as long in a two-, three- or four-newspaper town? A paper like the L.A. Times is far less reliant on public-sector advertising than one like La Vanguardia, but does that matter if the ratio of print media resources to population shrinks to such an extent that beats are not covered? There's a reason why the final season of The Wire was set in the Baltimore Sun newsroom: newspapers are to democracy what canaries are in a mine. If they die off, the oxygen is going. Even if Spanish papers sometimes read like mouthpieces for political parties of factions thereof, at least they compete, and their investigative resources, if trained on the idealogical enemy, are at least engaged and productive. If public money keeps more papers going, could it be a good thing? Is subsidised Barcelona better off than L.A.?