Niall Ferguson:
"I was riveted by (Karl) Kraus’s central theme, that World War I could to some extent be understood as a media-driven event."
Lewis Lapham:
"The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the
trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear about
what might happen tomorrow...
Following is what Marathi daily Loksatta has published on its front page on April 20 1013. The paper is lauding American media's maturity in handling the Boston manhunt.
Sure, 26/11 coverage was bungled by Indian media but American e-news-media are as lousy as Indian if not worse because they have been in the business for much longer.
This is what Adam Gopnik says in The New Yorker on the Boston episode:
On leaders' behaviour in the wake of the conclusion of the manhunt:
"Then, of course, the cops and officials stepped forward to claim credit, or at least a piece of the spotlight, for the arrest. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz announced that now “my journey begins.” One imagined the real heroes and heroines of the occasion standing back in the shadows, smiling ironically at the politicians’ posturing."
On the over-reaction of the administration:
"...The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.
The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige."
On media:
"The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three kinds of journalists: the reporter, who says what he’s seen; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he’s seen; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. The first two—reporters and interpretive reporters—have been largely undermined by economics and incuriosity. But the third category never stops growing. We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced."
