Newspapers

'When I entered journalism, the press of the country, with only one exception that I can now recall, was clean, dignified and sober minded. It had various aims in life, aims political, literary, scientific, social, religious, reformatory and mixed, which were deemed by the conductors of the papers advantageous to the commonweal. To make money by pandering to the vices and follies of the community, and thus adding to the mass of vice and folly, was generally unthinkable'. This being a quote, reproduced in the February 27 number of the NYRB, from Horace White writing in 1904, a time when he was the elder statesman among journalists in the US.

Leaving aside the probability that he was taking a rose-tinted view of the halcyon days of his youth, whatever would he have made of the world in which we now find ourselves?

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_White_(writer). An entry which suggests that he knew enough Ancient Greek to do translations. Which reminds me that we have a journalist who likes to flaunt such skills as Prime Minister.