I Think America Has A Brilliant Future.

We Always Talk About How Everyone Is Unifocal. You Can't Possibly Be Interested In Jazz And Beethoven. Of Course You Can. You Can't Both Be Reading A Newspaper And Be Online. Of Course You Can. We Shouldn't Be Obsessed With A Gun To Your Head, 'you Either Read A Newspaper Or Die!'

The 'gatekeepers' Became A Term Of Revile. But When You Think About The Flow Of Information, I Personally Value Immensely The Calibration A News Organ, Whether It's On The Web Or In Print, Brings To The Floodwaters Of Information. I Haven't The Time To Read All The Dispatches Of The Associated Press, For Example. It's Fantastic What They Put Out, It's Extremely Good, From All Over The World. I Like When Someone Acts As A Filter.

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.

In Journalism It Is Simpler To Sound Off Than It Is To Find Out. It Is More Elegant To Pontificate Than It Is To Sweat.