One reason why the MSM is the way it is today: The good guys have been kicked out.
I'm reading The Vanished Hands by Robert Wilson. It is police procedural fiction taking place in Seville, Spain. It's an interesting read. In fact, it's like Eastern European literature in the time of the Soviet Union.
I was struck by the following passage between Police Inspector Falcon and an old, seemingly burnt-out crime editor.
"You're not going to talk your way in here," said Falcon, pushing a note with his home address and 10 p.m. written on it."
Do you know why I left Madrid?" said Guzman, ignoring the note. "I was pushed. If you ask people why, they'll tell you that I'd started to live in a hall of mirrors. I didn't know what was real any more. I was paranoid. But the reality was that I was pushed because I'd become a zealot. I got that way because the stories I would run with always had something that made me writhe with rage. I couldn't control it. I'd become the worst thing possible - the emotional journalist."
"We don't allow that in the police force either . . . or we all start cracking up."
"It's an incurable disease," said Guzman. "I know that now because when I read what Velasco used to get up to in the Venda Sexy I hit the same white-hot vein of rage. That's what he used to do to human beings. Not just torture them, but fill them with his own appalling corruption. And the next thing I know I'm back to thinking that was Pinochet. That's what Pinochet thought of human beings. And why was he there? Because Nixon and Kissinger wanted him there. They would rather have someone who promoted the electricution of genitals, the raping of women, the abuse of children than . . . than what? Than a tubby bespectacled little Marxist who was going to make life difficult for the rich. Now you see my problem, Javier. I have become what my bosses used to call me - my own worst enemy. You're not allowed to feel, you're only supposed to report the facts. But, you see, it's in that feeling that my instinct lies and it hasn't failed me, because I know that the rage I felt when I found out about Miguel Valasco's specialty guided me here this morning because it wants my nose to be in the door of the cover-up as it slams shut."
Where's the rage?