Monday, November 01, 2021

Newspapers

“Some newspaper stories can be presented in entertaining ways; they can make you laugh; they can make you weep. But they are not charged with providing exaltation or fantasy. In the most entertained nation in the history of the world, newspapers exist to provide the citizenry with truth. Sometimes the truth can have a moral point. Sometimes the truth is painful. Sometimes the truth is banal. But it has to be true. It must have a granitelike foundation in fact. The mere stacking of facts is not, of course, enough. The facts must be organized into a coherent whole. They must tell a story. And the great story usually tells us something larger than the mere facts, something about what novelists and philosophers have called, perhaps too grandly, the human condition.”
Pete Hamill, News Is a Verb

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