Hard-pressed
The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. — Oscar Wilde Gripes about the dismal prospects of the Fourth Estate are probably as old as the printing press itself. News consumers are uninformed and ill served by journalists who focus on the superficial, too often delivering a narrow and inaccurate portrait of the nation’s public affairs, protesters typically declaim. Pioneering journalist and scholar Walter Lippmann, Class of 1909, was an early and influential critic of the press. Writing in 1919, he said newspapers are “the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read.” And as such, Lippmann posits, journalists have a sacred duty to distinguish for citizens what is news and what is truth. Now, using Lippmann’s critiques as his...