Though you wouldn’t know it for reading Connecticut-based news outlets, the story surrounding U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s sweetheart mortgage deals continues to generate interest across the nation.  Here at The Everyday Republican, the Chairman’s post on Dodd’s double dealing gained links from nationally-known Instapundit and the National Review posted links to the site, generating our single best day ever for traffic.

Of course, all this attention raises the perfectly legitimate question: where is the Connecticut news media?  It is true that some of them have had articles on this in the past, and indeed the Chairman’s post was generated from Kevin Rennie’s commentary piece that appeared in the Hartford Courant.  But Rennie isn’t an investigative journalist and the Courant isn’t the only paper of note in the State.

Part of the problem is that the investigative journalism that was the hallmark of a certain era of journalists - those who grew up idolizing Woodward and Bernstein - have parted the field as antiquated business models and conglomeration killed the local newspaper.  The remnants of the great American newsprint tradition are either too biased or too frail to properly hold Senator Dodd to account. 

Those in the State that bore witness to the events surrounding former Republican Governor John Rowland could little be faulted for simply citing bias.  One has to wonder whether Senator Dodd’s excuses would hold up under the same level of examination given to Governor Rowland.

It is, however, possible that this reality is the simple byproduct of dependence on antiquated business models - remaining reliant on classified advertising and subscriptions while the Internet made their product obsolete.  Survival has meant consolidation, downsizing, and the death of the local newspaper.  Old fashioned muckraking doesn’t seem to occupy the same plane in the new journalism.

On the other hand, the thousands of visitors to this site and others would seem to defy that conclusion on this day.  Instead, it would seem, actually reporting the news without bias appeals to people, many of whom would very much like to believe in their elected officials again.  Until the rest of the news outlets figure this out, we’ll have to keep reading the blogs for the kind of journalism that matters.