The scandal at the Army's Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. was uncovered by a newspaper. And it wasn't easy.

That’s why it's a fitting subject for Sunshine Week, dedicated to openness in government.

It was the Washington Post that exposed the shameful living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by many service veterans who were housed in a kind of dormitory outside the hospital premises. Not a government inspection agency, not the Army itself, not an advocate for the soldiers. It was a newspaper, a family-owned newspaper, which decided that the welfare of returning United States troops was worth spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to investigate.

The Post assigned two reporters, Ann Hull and Dana Priest, basically full-time for four months to ferret out the story of the failures at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Four months prying into things that authorities didn't want them to know, of quietly talking to veterans' families, visiting the hospital, even staying overnight. They came back from each visit, Priest said, filled "with outrage and sadness that were very motivating."

For its thanks, when the story broke, the Washington Post had to endure the whine from Army officials that the paper was only reporting the bad news. Lots of great things were happening at Walter Reed Hospital—why was the Post just reporting the bad stuff?

This is one time that ancient complaint fell flat. The public understood the importance of the newspaper's role, understood that the newspaper had no obligation to dilute its story by "balancing" Walter Reed's failures with its manifold successes. The Walter Reed story was a shameful story, but an important story, that needed to be told, because something could be fixed. And the Washington Post did its job.

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That's why a comment the next week on the Jim Lehrer News Hour came with such devastating force. It came from David Brooks, the likeable, somewhat conservative columnist at the New York Times. Pointing to the financial resources that the Post had devoted to its exposé, Brooks hazarded the guess that such a story couldn't be written in most cities.

The reason? Most newspapers, even in large cities, don't have that kind of money any more, and if they do, their corporate chain owners won't spend it on independent investigations.

A brilliant segment of "Frontline" a few days later told the same tale—of how corporate ownership is draining the newsrooms of even our top-flight news organizations (focusing on the Los Angeles Times), to say nothing of the hundreds of pretty-good newsrooms in smaller cities around the country. The same trend away from hard news is happening in television, too, of course, where news is being displaced by opinion and entertainment; but it's most important in newspapers. That's because, the Frontline broadcast said, of all the important news that ends up on TV radio or in webcasts or blogs, almost all of it first appeared in newspapers. It was newspapers which paid the money to train the reporters and send them out to work. Most other media just recycled that the papers told them.

Case in point: after Hull and Priest reported the Walter Reed exposé, more than 1000 blogs linked to the story.

Unfortunately, the newspapers are doing difficult original reporting less and less, cutting reporters and foreign bureaus. That's partly because of competition from other media, but mostly because of the media chains who see newspapers not as a vital public service but as a source of cash. Not as a life, but as a living.

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The Walter Reed story, then, is not just a story about the competence of the Army, or of the Bush Administration. Even competent organizations will have things go wrong, and will try to cover them up. The Walter Reed story is also about the importance of newspapers, about the kind of service they can provide to people who deserve help but aren't getting it, about how they can muster resources to counter untrammeled power, and provide a voice for the common people.

If David Brooks is right, though, this may be a story written in the past tense. That would make it a sad tale indeed.