… [I]solated efforts at contextualization fall increasingly short as Trump’s corruption balloons to nearly unimaginable proportions. That’s especially true as most right-wing media outlets’ interest in corruption would appear to apply only to Democrats.

One of the most important jobs of any media outlet in a democracy is to hold those in power accountable. Democracy doesn’t work if the public doesn’t know or understand what’s happening in their government. As polling shows, people clearly care a great deal about government corruption, but if they have little sense of its mechanics, scale or worst perpetrators, they can’t easily address it. With the midterm elections suggesting a mandate for rooting it out, there’s no more critical time for journalists to step up and shine the line—brightly and consistently—on what our elected and unelected officials are doing to us.