The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.

All institutions have lapses, even great ones, especially by individual rogue employees - famously in recent years at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the three original TV networks.

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.