Internet news cycles are by the minute, and any fool can take a headline from the Associated Press and send it out as news.

I wrote about Bosnia at the time. Somebody looked out their window and saw gangsters coming down the street and doing ethnic cleansing. I said that was the thing that would happen in the future, someone phoning in what they were seeing on the scene. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Drudge Report or the BBC, all those reports, you have to assume there's a real person [who] has credibility.

Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.

In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.

My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

People were murdered for the camera; and some photographers and a television camera crew departed without taking a picture in the hope that in the absence of cameramen acts might not be committed. Others felt that the mob was beyond appeal to mercy. They stayed and won Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?