Newspapers have been in decline for more than a decade now and that is bad news for good government and a free flow of information to regular people.

Not that everyone is clear on this.

John Oliver addressed the topic on Sunday in his HBO show Last Week Tonight.

It is funny (in Oliver’s hands) as well as sad and frightening, but anyone who is concerned about Where News Comes From should follow the link and watch the 20-minute video.

It will cost you nothing — which is what you expect from the internet, a selfish attitude most of us long ago thoughtlessly embraced. Without pausing to consider how your online news sources get the information they are passing on or spinning to their own advantage.

Oliver makes clear the crucial link between newspaper reporting, even as tens of thousands of newspaper journalists have been forced out of the business, and the rest of the “news world” — including a 20-second segment which demonstrates how heavily TV news leans on newspapers to tell them what is happening.

Said Oliver: “It’s pretty obvious — without newspapers to cite, TV news would just be Wolf Blitzer endlessly batting a ball of yarn around.”

Go watch the video now — here it is again — and then come back.

What most consumers do not understand, and which Oliver attempts to make clear, the accurate information a person finds online, for free, originates in newspapers.

That news gets picked up by TV and by news aggregators and then by social media sites like Facebook.

Consumers of that news usually have no idea that the story was originally written in that sad, shrunken local publication knows as a newspaper — which even now has more trained reporters in the field than any hundred websites you care to name.

The internet is killing newspapers. Not only because the immediacy of the web trumps the paper product many of us once read every day … but also because newspapers are finding it nearly impossible to make their websites profitable.

Oliver points out that while newspapers gained $2 billion in online ad revenue from 2004 to 2014, they lost $30 billion in print revenue.

That is how we have gone from what was perhaps the zenith of newspaper excellence, in the 1980s and 1990s, to the understaffed, overworked newspapers of today.

Oliver suggests that when newspapers and their trained journalists are gone, fresh information will decline precipitously, as will good government, now that your local planning commission (et cetera) knows no one is watching what they do.

(In the video, a prominent journalist suggests the coming years will be the Golden Age of Government Corruption, without reporters on hand to expose wrongdoing to the light of day.)

The video ends with a brilliant piece of satire showing how digging for a story — think the 2015 best picture winner, Spotlight, the telling of how the Boston Globe exposed child abuse by priests — is now compromised even inside the offices of newspapers.

The editor of the newspaper, played by a clueless Jason Sudeikis, and his cronies around the editorial table continually ignore or belittle the corruption story the reporter wants to cover … instead focusing on what might be a cross between a cat and a raccoon — the CatRac, online and social media gold but ultimately unimportant.

What should you do?

Some civic good.

–If you are interested in the journalism produced by newspapers with “pay walls” — spend the money to get past the wall and support that publication’s editorial work.

–If you take advantage of newspaper sites that do not have a pay wall (the New York Times and The Guardian are two), find the area of the website that deals with “subscriptions” or “supporters” and send that newspaper money — essentially paying at least something for what you have been getting for free for decades.

If you do not support newspapers in this time of crisis, well, don’t go crying to … whomever you can get to listen to you … when your “news” is reduced to what government spokesmen and partisan gasbags claim is the truth.

You can always spend your time looking at photos of puppies, kittens, and CatRacs.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said, more than 200 years ago: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

If we do not act, we will have the option Jefferson feared.