If an Interest Group Says We Need to Spend More Money, Check It Out

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:

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.”

DiLoreto says the country needs something like $84 billion dollars in water infrastructure investments between now and 2020.

Carolyn Berndt, program director at the National League of Cities, says local governments haven’t had the access to the kind of capital they need to make these upgrades.

“The traditional method has been through the state revolving loan funds," Berndt says. "Those numbers have been declining in recent years.”

Berndt says if cities are going fix their leaky pipes, they’ll need more financing than just a drop in the bucket.

That's the whole story. And maybe them's the facts, though Chris Edwards would beg to differ. But the information comes entirely from the National League of Cities, speaking for cities that want more money, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, the people who would be called on to design and build new or improved infrastructure. Journalists shouldn't rely entirely on the oil industry for the facts on the Keystone pipeline, or the teachers union for the facts about education, and they shouldn't rely entirely on civil engineers or asphalt manufacturers for the facts on infrastructure.