Rachel Maddow, Voice of the People

If you want to know what's wrong with the "liberal media," just take a look at Rachel Maddow's new $30 million annual deal with NBCUniversal. Maddow, who will reportedly step away from her nightly show next year, is actually being paid a lot more to work a lot less.

In The Paper (an excellent movie about the glory days of New York newspapers), Robert Duvall, playing an ink-stained managing editor, says to a disgruntled colleague, "People like us don't make the money." That's true of nearly all journalists -- but not ones like Maddow.

Journalists who make $30 million a year are owned. Oh, I'm sure Maddow doesn't see it that way. But she is a corporate asset. Maybe she would compulsively bash the Russians anyway. Maybe she would still have policed the Democratic Party, making sure that the likes of Bernie Sanders and other outspoken socialists never got anywhere near the top. But that $30 million a year ensures that she will remain a voice of the Democratic establishment, at a time when we desperately need unbought, articulate media voices.

When I was running Salon, I could've sold out to Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I could have turned Salon into a small satellite of the New York Times or Time-Warner. But (as my family often wryly reminds me), I never got rich off my media venture. We remained rigorously and giddily independent. And years later, I still have no regrets -- even though at age 70, I have no family savings to speak of.

Some journalists value their work higher than their bank accounts. Near the end of the film version of The Crucible (another good movie), the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis says he can't sign a bogus confession "because it's my name." He says it with great agony because it means he will be executed. I never faced the same life-or-death stakes. But that scene deeply moved me.

Laughing all the way to the bank