You’d think it deserved more attention since we’re literally the backyard of one of the largest casinos in Pennsylvania, and to say Hellertown has an historic rep as a gambler’s den is an understatement of the first order.

It’s been bad for a long time, and it’s getting worse.

Across the Lehigh Valley and Saucon Valley, fewer and fewer community governmental meetings get the news coverage they deserve, and that means corruption, cronyism and anti-democratic disenfranchisement will rise. Bank on it.

The Morning Call Guild of journalists walked out over pay ands conditions at the paper last week, and its heartbreaking to witness: Many of those writers want nothing more than to serve the public, but the Morning Call’s investment fund owners have almost cost-cut the paper to death.

In Saucon Valley, we’re not as ill-informed as some communities, but much of the public seems incapable or unwilling to imagine what life would be like here without the quality local news we do get.

Here’s a hint: The quality of life will suck, our community, and the good things associated with (including property values and local services), will decline.

Local bürgermeisters of BS and princes and princesses of deceit pray for that day, but they wouldn’t like it either if they knew better. That’s the day they turn your local information sources into one big ad flyer, mostly to hawk real estate, funerals and nursing care. But since that would benefit a tiny few, it would also be self-sabotaging in the end.

Does anyone really want to go there?

One whiff of the sickening click-stinkbait that is today’s Nazareth Patch previews what awaits us all if our news deserts keep growing.

Patch used to contain real news. It used to be halfway admirable. Now it peddles McMansions.

I know quite a few journalists in the Lehigh Valley, and many of them feel helpless about the whole situation. The Morning Call’s editorial staff has been slashed again and again, and so many older publications in the Valley have vanished.

The critical exception is Josh Popichak’s Saucon Source, one of the few independent community news sources left standing in the Lehigh Valley.

But it’s tough for Josh. He’s too principled not to take his journalism seriously, yet he provides an essentially free news product to a community that takes it for granted. The public often expects Saucon Source to cover every story except the ones dealing with information they want to avoid. If Josh does upbeat local business pieces (and that and schools stories traditionally comprise much community journalism), he’s accused of not being a “real journalist.” (Let me tell you something: He’s as serious and as professional as they come in the Lehigh Valley.) If he presents hard-hitting stories on government or crime, he’s being “too negative.”

It’s a no-win situation.

Saucon Source has a superb membership program to help support its work. (If you’re not a member, you should stop reading me and support Saucon Source, because what it does is far more consequential than this blog.) I feel Saucon Source needs a paywall, but Josh has generously opted not to roll one out so far. Many local publications in 2022 actually must rely on grants or non-profit benefactors to survive. His membership program is a move in that direction. But it needs members.

It lowers the bar for everyone when the go-to move for officials and/or candidates reacting to criticism is taking their critics to court.

Of course, neither Zavaacky nor anyone on council said a word about the Hellertown Area Library or library funding issues in their campaigns last year because no one actually considered it an authentic problem …

Banonis and Carocci must have known their lawsuit had zero chance of success in a world that’s not yet the totalitarian state of their late-night fantasies. But I don’t think their point was to win. It was to scare, harass and exude power.

Do you ever see stuff in the New York Times, and you’re just like, um, dude … please?

Wild phlox, yellow cinquefoil, violets, and daisies of “pushing up” fame—all these wildflowers spring through the tall grass.