News media, past and present

Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.

Also present was everything we admire—and require—from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.

Same as it ever was.

Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011), p. xiv