With media on the ropes, government controls more and more of the decisions on what information to release and when to release it.

No better example comes to mind than a recent horrible situation in Fort Collins in the Old Town area. A truck apparently backed into another vehicle and then accelerated forward and killed a man and injured at least three more people, a couple seriously, before smashing into a tree.

In took days to name the person who was killed. All we got was that he was a Denver man. No follow up. No nothing. Not in the local paper or Denver papers or tv stations. We had dinner at a restaurant near where people had posted memorials to the dead man on the tree that was hit. One was from his sister. Another from a brother. That is the only way we even knew he had family. Isn’t that a helluva note?

The driver of the truck? Crickets. No name, no age, no nothing from police. It has gone on so long, the rumor mill has the driver being “connected” and the information suppressed. That’s what you get in the vacuum created by lack of reporting.

And nothing about the seriously injured, no names, nothing. An online posting said one of the injured was his wife. But how do we know what is true?

In the days of media presence, we would have hounded authorities for information and we would have been back by citizens who also want to know, not just out of some morbid curiosity, but out of genuine interest and concern. It is news.

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There are a lot of serious problems with trained media being replaced by online gossip.

I don’t think it bodes well for this country.