What Big Media doesn't want you to know

When there are taxes to be raised or a failed education system to prop up, The Lexington Herald Leader is the place to go.

But if you are looking for help forcing state and local governments to post their checkbooks online for everyone to see, they are asleep at the wheel.

Here is why:

If goons like the bureaucrats at the Lexington airport knew that if they rented strippers and bought guns with taxpayer money their expenditures would be posted to the internet and everyone would know, they would spend more time working and less messing around.

No messing around, no scandal. No scandal, no opportunity for a political figure friend to "investigate" the big story. And no big story.

Big stories sell newspapers.

If Kentucky's First Amendment-protected newspapers were as interested in preventing scandals as they are in reporting on them, they would advocate for government transparency.

I'm headed to Frankfort to hear testimony in the Senate State and Local Government Committee about how spending transparency improves government. Interesting to see if any reporters cover that.