The United States is the world's first liberal democracy, a product of the The Enlightenment. As such, the founders built it on the principles of unity, liberty, tolerance and equal rights. And they designed it to make policy based on factual knowledge and bathed in the light of reason. But, today, in the time of Trump, factual knowledge is getting clouded over in several ways.
Despite cutbacks and financial stress in the industry, the mainstream daily newspaper is still on the job, reporting corruption in public office. For example, here are a few boiled-down summaries of reports that I found over the past month in the local daily I subscribe to.
(The Detroit Free Press, June 14.) The wheels of justice slowly, surely turning ...
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced the fourth round of criminal charges in the Flint water crisis. The state charged five persons with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Robert Skidmore by Legionnaire's disease. An outbreak of the waterborne disease, which killed 12 and struck dozens more, followed the switch of the city's water from the Detroit system to the Flint River.
Among those charged are Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon and former Flint emergency manager Darnell Early. Lyons is accused of failing to alert the public to the outbreak of the disease for a year after he became aware of it. He is also charged with misconduct in office for instructing an official to stop study that would help find the cause of the disease outbreak.
The state also charged Michigan Chief Medical Executive Dr. Eden Wells with obstruction of justice and lying to a police officer. The obstruction of justice charge alleges that Wells threatened to withhold funding for the Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership if it did not stop its investigation into the source of the disease outbreak.
Irony of ironies. After railing against digital media and people getting their news "free" for the better part of a decade, the tides have once again turned, and traditional media was able to adjust their oversized-creaking wooden surfboard to catch the wave... barely.
