Our trust deficit just keeps growing

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

A two-part series in the (often) venerable New York Times suggests some are on the take, providing reports and espousing findings that happen to mirror the wishes of their major corporate donors.

And some "independent" experts offering testimony to Congress and info to media are also on payrolls and/or boards of major companies, which, as you know, always seek to have their way in shaping public policy.

Among the tagged: "the prestigious" Brookings Institution (founded in 1916) and the American Enterprise Institute (founded in 1938).

The Times cited $400,000 in donations to Brookings from a corporation that, among other things, sells solar rooftop systems. Brookings then published a report on the benefits of such systems and named a corporation executive as one of its senior fellows.

The Times also reported that an American Enterprise Institute fellow who pushed research calling for increased spending for military equipment happened to be a lobbyist for Pentagon suppliers of such equipment.

These think tanks, of course, stand by the value and veracity of their work.

In the same way I suppose the Times did in 2008 when it endorsed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama after the Clinton Foundation gave $100,000 to the Neediest Cases Fund, a charity run by the newspaper.

Imagine that.