The Washington Post added an operations-wide mantra – “Democracy dies in darkness” – during the first 100 days of this disaster drill of a presidency. The media company hadn’t needed a catchy slogan in its previous 140 years, because, I guess, this country’s democratic ambitions didn’t need much articulating or cheerleading.

Autocratic system-rigging, though, combined with a consolidated, corrupted and weakened Fourth Estate, are just among the threats to our country’s grand experiment. Citizens of this country actually are getting arrested now for peacefully protesting (in Texas!), asking questions of public officials and – yes, really – for laughing.

The guffaw of a small, elderly librarian, adorned in a pink crown, literally triggered a goon squad, who dragged her from a U.S. congressional hearing. Laughter had been fine earlier in this hearing, but when she chuckled out of sync with the nominee’s supporters, authorities grabbed and dragged this woman out of the room like she was trying to fly home on United Airlines.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, by the way, lied under oath and now appears to also have interfered in a recused-upon case. No one has dragged him anywhere.

As illustrated by these events (and informed by pretty much all of world history), democracy is not the natural order of the world; barbaric authoritarianism is.

To its credit, the United States had pushed democracy further than it ever had been extended before, in many respects. Now, we’re backsliding into a different sort of darkness, filled with an overabundance of empty ideas, a shortage of accountability and too much, in effect, light and lightness.

Reader “R Rapoza” lamented in a comment last week about the effects of media consolidation nationwide, leaving communities, including those throughout the Hawaiian islands, without solid local coverage, especially from multiple competing sources. Rapoza added, “Corporate demands also result in fewer enterprise stories, less analysis, and more focus on quick turnaround to feed a relentless news cycle.”

In other words, the light-and-bright news snack that used to be a welcome reprieve from a generally heavy and serious information diet has been inverted and converted into the main course, like a Cheeto served as an entree.

Many people have compared our present society to the writings of George Orwell, “Animal Farm” and “1984” in particular, but a better case might be made for the dystopian society of Aldous Huxley’s “A Brave New World,” a place where, as Neil Postman once presciently phrased, we’re “amusing ourselves to death.”

This is a place where prominent politicians might huff and complain about being “ambushed” when a journalist asks a reasonable – yet challenging – question, about public policy or political philosophy.

Back on Oahu, our media reports often get blended with corporate interests, as sneaky forms of marketing and advertising.

Our state’s largest media organization, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, for example, has kept our eyes and minds filled recently with the “breaking news” that Hawaiian Airlines was updating its Pualani logo from a profile image of a young woman with a flower in her hair to a profile image of that same young woman with the same flower, albeit with a slightly different hairstyle.

But wait, here’s where the news gets really exciting. The flowery sort of background that had been behind the woman for the past 16 years has been converted into a sun-like orb.

This logo-tastic multimedia package dominated more than half of the Local & Business section cover in the printed paper on May 2, only to jump inside (for the rest of the story!). The large accompanying photo showed CEO Mark Dunkerley wearing a lei and looking so smart and commanding, with an airplane floating above a coastline behind him.

Dunkerley, in large pull-quote type, said updating the logo was “really a fantastic opportunity for us,” like some other entity was giving them this rare never-before anticipated chance. Note to Dunkerley: You’re the CEO; you can change the logo whenever you want. “For a closer look,” readers also were given a hyperlink to a company website to look at more images and video of the designs.

But even if you visited www.staradvertiser.com instead, you could find the promotional materials there disguised as news. This web coverage – which ran twice, on two different days, with slightly different content, under different headlines – began with a nearly three-minute promotional video.

This slick piece appears to have been created by the airlines (since it gooily spreads the company message), although the video does not have a credit that I could find, not within the video or adjacent to it, as is customary.

The first press release, um, article, by Dave Segal toes the company line, but the second one has a bit of subversiveness buried in it. After all of the blather of the first piece and a note about which musicians performed at the party, Segal suddenly bursts into journalist mode and cribs colleague Kevin Dayton’s reporting about the troubled place where they are celebrating.

That hangar actually is a slow-going cargo facility at the airport many years behind schedule, 50 percent over budget (from the $73 million estimate to $120 million, at least, to finish), with 3,561 construction defects.

When asked about it, Dunkerley charged that the quality of the work “has been very, very poor.” Yet the story declines to name the allegedly incompetent general contractor involved in a legal battle with the Department of Transportation.

Dayton had all of those details at hand, including identifying the company as DCK. But Segal avoided pointing a finger at a group that allegedly had bilked the state (and all of us taxpayers) out of millions.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story suggested that Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Dayton works “just a few desks” away from Dave Segal. While Dayton does regularly come to the newspaper’s main newsroom, Dayton primarily works out of the paper’s office at the state Capitol.

In the printed version of this piece, that newsy section of the story ended up on the inside page. So the most compelling facts were both buried in darkness but also flooded out by the lightest of the light. Somewhere in-between, our journalistic ideology gasped in torment.