In today’s Chicago Tribune, Don Wycliffe, the Public Editor writes an essay regretting the lack of unexpurgated news printed in today’s papers. He says that papers used to print entire speeches and reports and let the reader decide what was going on. He says papers print too many analyses and interpretations instead of verbatim transcripts and he feels that the papers ought to do more.
Quote:
“It’s ironic isn’t it? As our readers have become better educated, more literate, more able to to think for themselves and more insistent on doing so, we in the industry have given them less of what they need to do so. Instead, we give them more analyses and interpretation, which they distrust because analyses and interpretation, by definition, depart from the objective ideal of the newspaper, which we have taught them to expect.”