Full Screed Ahead
11th June 2014
WE no longer have news. We have springboards for commentary. We have cues for Tweets.
Something happens, and before the facts are even settled, the morals are deduced and the lessons drawn. The story is absorbed into agendas. Everyone has a preferred take on it, a particular use for it. And as one person after another posits its real significance, the discussion travels so far from what set it in motion that the truth — the knowable, verifiable truth — is left in the dust.
The most amusing thing about it is that the venue in which he writes, the New York Times, is one of the lead dogs in this particular pack. This is like somebody writing in Soviet Pravda that there are too many oppressive totalitarian dictatorships in the world.