Muckraking is back!
As a history major, I'm accustomed to reading and thinking about the past. Getting to relive it is another story entirely. Why shell out for a time machine or bother to invent one, when life under the current administration is a return to the pre-Teddy Roosevelt era of robber barons, Mark Hanna, President McKinley, and the railroad tycoons?
There's plenty of muck to rake, Paul Krugman assures us, in his 11/20/03 NY Review of Books piece on muckraking books and authors.
We're living in a replay of the Gilded Age, in which robber barons openly bought and sold government officials and their policies. And just as the Gilded Age brought forth a golden age of muckraking, our modern descent into money politics has brought forth a new wave of outraged reporters. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose are worthy heirs of an honorable tradition.
Despite the volume-length carpings of all those liberal authors, there are plenty of anecdotes to go around.
You might think that with all the books out there—Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Joe Conason's Big Lies, David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush, and even my own column collection—there would be a lot of repetition. Yet the Bush era provides, as my New York Times colleague Thomas Friedman says, a "target-rich environment." While there is some overlap between the liberal books of this fall, each book focuses on a different piece of the picture.
Toxic waste, the Enron ripoff, corporations that write policy rather than merely influencing it (read energy taskforce Cheney held a few years ago. He still refuses to release the notes and attendance list for those meetings)
6:46:28 AM 
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