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

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

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.

I think a lot of newspapers have lost touch with that sense of community, which so impressed me as a teenager when I had to knock on people's doors.

When I was studying at Chicago and at Stanford University, where many many cases of two people observing the same event have a different take on what happened.

This impressed me when I was the editor of the Sunday Times [of London] - we had the "Bloody Sunday" killings of 13 unarmed civilians by British paratroopers. We interviewed 500 people for our report, and not one of them could give us a total picture of what was happening. It was like the Rashomon effect multiplied a million times. For a website or even a newspaper to be a collector of information flow is not the highest form of journalism.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.