"When screaming headlines turn out to be based on stories that don'tsupport them, the tale of the boy who cried wolf gets new life. When thenewspaper is filled with stupid features about celebrities at theexpense of hard news, the reader feels patronized. In the process, thecritical relationship of reader to newspaper is slowly undermined."--from NEWS IS A VERBNEWS IS A VERBJournalism at the End of the Twentieth Century"Withthe usual honorable exceptions, newspapers are getting dumber. They areincreasingly filled with sensation, rumor, press-agent flackery, andbloated trivialities at the expense of significant facts. The Lewinskyaffair was just a magnified version of what has been going on for sometime. Newspapers emphasize drama and conflict at the expense ofanalysis. They cover celebrities as if reporters were a bunch of waifswith their noses pressed enviously to the windows of the rich andfamous. They are parochial, square, enslaved to the conventionalpieties. The worst are becoming brainless printed junk food. All acrossthe country, in large cities and small, even the better newspapers arepredictable and boring. I once heard a movie director say of a certainscreenwriter: 'He aspired to mediocrity, and he succeeded.' Manynewspapers are succeeding in the same way."