Starvin Larry

Corruption is a scourge infecting almost everyone who comes in contact with it. The media is not immune. There was never a golden age when an incorruptible press exposed political and government skullduggery without fear or favor. The press’s shrine to itself—Watergate—was, to use a well-worn phrase, a partisan witch hunt; unthinkable if President Nixon had been a Democrat and had not been loathed by the media elite. As Nixon knew, his two Democratic predecessors had committed more heinous acts that the press had never turned into causes célèbre. As the two main political parties have merged to become the party of government (the only remaining differences are who gets to dispense the spoils and to whom) the press has become its public relations arm, regardless of which party holds nominal power.

Washington’s endemic insularity and corruption have bred the political counter-revolution propelling Donald Trump’s, Bernie Sanders’, and to a…