In the 90s there were movies about corporate corruption featuring a lone employee that had to risk their life to uncover the truth. In the end, they always took down the evil corporation because the people, the media, the government actually cared. Nowadays, we’re rife with corporate scandals and all we do is shrug and say “of course.” Whistleblowers get murdered. The media maybe covers the stories for a day, a week. Stocks maybe take a dip. The CEO gets golden parachuted to another company.
Maybe the movies were always fantasies, but it seems so strange now. I was on the young side when the whole Enron scandal happened. Too young to pay close attention to the details, but old enough to remember there was a big hubbub about it in the media for quite a long time. If that happened today, I imagine it would be a blip in the news before we all forgot about it. I keep wondering if maybe it was always like this, but then I think back to that. Anyway, all those movies feel silly now.
Now I’m thinking about 24 and how wild that show felt at the time. How the president being a traitor was shocking. Now we’ve faced that reality and a significant portion of the media don’t treat it with any sort of seriousness, the man still has lots of supporters including an evil cabal of billionaires financing him. President Logan at least operated in the shadows with foreign adversaries. Now it’s all an open “secret” and people act like it’s normal. It feels like bizarro world.
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