Professional journalism is considered one of the most important agencies of social control.

Without him, the inhibitions against moral violations and violations of the law would be lower.

Journalists are not unwilling to hear this thesis because it flatters them.

But can you prove it?

The difficulties are obvious.

You can't very well close down all the newspaper offices in a country just for experimental purposes.

That's why the two authors of a recently published study looked for an alternative method of investigation - and found it in an unplanned experiment: the crisis of American local journalism.

In many of the country's metropolitan areas, where there were still a large number of local daily newspapers before advertising withdrew to the Internet, there is now only one single weekly newspaper, which of course then misses out on almost everything that used to be reported regularly.

The attempt to compensate for these losses through greater lay participation in news production must be regarded as a failure.

The journalistic amateur behaves towards the people and organizations he is supposed to report on not as an independent journalist, but as a brother-in-law, as a colleague, as a member of a club.

Because he has to be gentle with his informants in all these roles, he can't very well approach them with suspicious questions, investigate their interests in the portrayal, or come forward as a public critic of their misconduct.

He thus lacks the protection of a socially recognized professional role for suspicious behavior that the professional journalist enjoys, and so, above all, those kind reports on celebratory occasions are to be expected from him,

Not all regions are affected to the same extent

The local journalism crisis is relatively recent, and accordingly not all regions have been equally impoverished.

In some of them you can still hear the vigorous barking of journalistic watchdogs, in others it has died down to the occasional growl.

This is a situation that is favorable for research, because in principle it makes it possible to relate such differences in the newspaper density of the various regions to the differences in their documented incidence of sin and to search for statistically comprehensible connections.

The two study authors attempted this using data for several American metropolitan areas, focusing on the misconduct area of ​​the court-notorious misdeeds of large companies.

Their first hypothesis is that the withdrawal of newspapers increases the willingness to break the law in an economically rational manner, and indeed they have found some evidence of such a trend.

Of course, it does not apply to all types of misconduct in the same way, but, for reasons that are not clear, above all to those that require indiscretions from company employees to uncover because they cannot be proven on their products or on environmental damage in the vicinity of their location.

It is therefore more likely that these are violations of labor law than violations of environmental regulations,

A second important finding comes from another set of data.

Based on the association life of the compared regions, they actually aim at the density of social contacts in them, because the effectiveness of informal controls depends on this.

Informal controls are those that are not exercised in the specially equipped roles of judge, police officer or journalist, but rather by participating in the dissemination of gossip stories.

In order to be effective, such controls require a high degree of mutual knowledge between those involved and a wide range of sanctions.

If the factory director cannot treat his workers badly without his Christian-minded wife finding out about it a little later, this can relieve the labor courts noticeably.

The authors now show that the gossip networks also relieve professional journalism.

Wherever they exist, the level of sin in the commercial establishments is no higher, even in the regions suffering from journalistic difficulties, than in those with a halfway intact press world.

Those who no longer have to fear journalists may still hold back for fear of social gossip.