I looked at the Huffpost website this morning with some disgust. Admittedly, Sunday is a poor news day, but instead of news of cute children, local tragedies, rescued pets, and little known facts, I find, instead, that the webpage is a fascist news sheet manipulated by rightwing nutters to keep themselves before the public eye. Reports about these monsters are rarely complimentary to them, but that does not matter, for they know they are winning so long as their photo and name make the frontpage.

So, in today’s Huffpost I found the following children of notoriety (I give the number of their mentions in parentheses): Donald Trump (5), Marjorie Taylor Greene (4), George Santos (3), Ron DeSantis (3), and one mention each for Mike Lee, Jim Jordan, Ron Johnson, Matt Gaetz, Sarah Huckaby Sanders, Kari Lake, and of two salaried fonts of misinformation, Lisa Kennedy Montgomery and Tucker Carlson from Fox News.

Why is this? Well, scandal sells, and the behavior of these figures is scandalous by design. Indeed, some of them compete in conjuring up ever new and more shocking scandals. And the media, keen to maintain their own notoriety at any cost, keep playing right into the hands of these bogus people, become less and less trustworthy, and provide some credibility to the accusation of “fake news.”