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

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.

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.

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.

Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies

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