Wealth & Money Quote by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson doesn’t describe television as merely corrupt; he renders it as a habitat designed to make corruption feel normal. The brilliance is in the mix of newsroom grievance and war-zone imagery: a "money trench" suggests a battlefield dug not for ideas but for profit, while the "long plastic hallway" swaps grit for sterile gloss. Plastic is cheap, mass-produced, and meant to be wiped clean. That’s the point. TV’s surface is engineered to look hygienic even as it launders the worst incentives in media.

His roster of villains - "thieves and pimps" - isn’t subtle, and it’s not meant to be. Thompson’s cynicism works because it’s specific: he frames the business as predatory, parasitic, transactional. The subtext is that television doesn’t just reward bad actors; it recruits them, turning journalism into a marketplace where attention is bought, sold, and coerced. "Good men die like dogs" is the line that stings: it’s not literal death so much as the death of professional dignity, the slow euthanasia of standards under ratings pressure and careerist fear.

Context matters: Thompson came up in print, when authority still lived on the page, and watched TV become the culture’s default reality filter. His hyperbole isn’t accidental; it’s a defensive overreaction from someone who understood that once journalism becomes performance, truth becomes just another prop. The quote lands because it refuses the comforting myth that the medium is neutral. It’s an accusation that the architecture itself is rigged.