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.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

I think there's a lot of benefit in letting people vent. When I was on the Manchester Evening News, we got 500 letters a day, and part of my job as editor was to edit them. And I thought that was one of the best things in the newspaper, and it was instituted by an editor known as Big Tom, who said 'this is the voice of the people.' And he was quite right.

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy.

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate.

When I first came to the United States in 1956 I fell in love with things - mainly the vitality and the freedoms.

Some blogs have become the best check on monopoly mainstream journalism, and they provide a surprisingly frequent source of initiative reporting.