by Robert Gore
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 lesser extent, Ted Cruz’s campaigns. Nobody should mistake the diffusion of the anger and its occasional incoherence for transience or impotency. Trump and Sanders have already made fools of the pundits who said their campaigns would fizzle by New Year’s. Some mainstream media figures have acknowledged that this phenomena is as much a vote against politics as usual as it is an endorsement of those candidates. However, there have been few media acknowledgements that it is also a vote against the media itself, the mouthpiece of the established order. There has been no shortage of snotty articles, editorials, and hit pieces on Trump, Sanders, their issues, and their voters.
