Well, we finally know who to blame.

President Joe Biden unexpectedly (for the White House press pool, at least) showed up on the Howard Stern Sirius XM radio show Friday. It was a mutual love fest that surprisingly provided some insight — but you had to be a subscriber to listen.

Stern, who dressed up in a suit a little too small for his expanding girth (according to him) fawned over Biden for a bit before asking him a few noteworthy questions. Biden confirmed he’d be willing to debate Donald Trump. That was the big news. But at one point the president turned the tables and asked Stern in essence, why does the media suck today?

Stern blamed social media and Bident said he “hasn’t figured it out yet,” but that the “free press isn’t speaking up as much as it used to.”

“Everyone is scared,” Stern argued. Biden agreed.

Excuse me?

As Samuel L. Jackson said in “Pulp Fiction”: “Allow me to retort.”

Yes, the press sucks. If you need to understand how badly we blow, I point you to David Pecker and his testimony in Manhattan this week during the first of potentially four Donald Trump felony trials. Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, is/was an independent journalist (or the colorectal cancerous example thereof) who is a slave to the money. His brand of toiletry involves writing stories for the absolutely lowest common denominator of homo sapiens.

As H.L. Mencken once noted, home sapiens are hopeless. “Go back through the history of the past thousand years and you will find that nine-tenths of the popular idols of the world – have been hawkers of palpable nonsense.” That’s why most stories in The National Enquirer were about things like giving birth to Big Foot’s baby, engaging in a threesome with space aliens and why Donald Trump is a great guy. Naturally, Trump loved Pecker. Read that any way you want.

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And while everyone this week is taking a deep dive on what the Trump trial means for the future of the presidency and politics, few reporters are examining what it shows about the bigger picture of the press: It’s all about the Benjamins.

Fewer and fewer companies own more and more of the media outlets, independence is waning and as a result, the news business is just a cash grab built around knee-jerk reactions and preconceived notions. David Pecker’s........

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