Young journalists are told, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Every day journalists follow that advice, protecting us all from reading rumors and unconfirmed stories in the morning papers (though of course the increasing pressure to be first with the news is threatening this rule).
But journalists are still too quick to take the word of special interests without seeking other viewpoints, especially in stories about things the taxpayers need to spend money on. Take this morning’s story about water infrastructure on Marketplace Radio:
Read the rest of this post →Following the expensive water-main break that flooded UCLA’s campus, Los Angeles officials say they’re trying to aggressively fix the city’s aging infrastructure.
The costs are daunting. It’s going to take the city of Los Angeles billions of dollars to fix.
“They estimate some over 20 millions of gallons of water were lost and of course it wound up on that new floor at the Pauley Pavilion Basketball Arena,” says Greg DiLoreto, former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “We have some 240,000 water main breaks a year in this country. And the age of our water infrastructure continues to get older and older and older.”