Dean Baquet, Biden and the NYT’s Invisible Corruption
When you work in a corrupt system, your own corruption becomes invisible to you. You know yourself to be an essentially good person. Your friends like you. You’re nice to your wife. You have professional accomplishments. And if you take a bribe now and then or lie or otherwise abuse the public trust, well, you’re a cop in 1960s New York, you’re a Soviet bureaucrat, you’re a Chicago Democrat – everyone around you is doing the same thing, and the only people who complain about it are the others, the non-cops, the counter-revolutionaries, the Republicans, the bad guys. You don’t have to listen to them. They’re beyond the pale.