The dominant media culture shows far too little appreciation, if not unmerited hostility, for wealthy philanthropists, especially conservative ones such as T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens, who died today at 91, earned every penny of his vast wealth, and gave away or bequeathed far more of it than he kept. The Dallas Morning News did a fine job in its feature obituary for him, well worth a read. He made it big not through an inheritance, but by dint of hard work and gumption, beginning as a newspaper boy who added more and more routes to his workload in the midst of the Great Depression.