"The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure." -- progressive investigative reporter, author and publisher I.F. Stone (12/24/1907 - 6/18/1989), editor of the much-read "I.F. Stone's Weekly" from 1953 to 1971.
Stone's humorous critique of the print media years ago still has validity today, where a corporate media is fighting for advertisers, subscribers and market share, more fearful of offending the offensive among us than in speaking the whole truth. As James Warren has written:
"Stone ... was essentially a dazzling pre-Internet blogger, whose weapon was a manual typewriter, a two-finger peck-and-poke style of typing and a print newsletter that once claimed 70,000 subscribers.
But at the heart of work that made him both a hero to many and a pariah to the establishment, which could include parts of the journalism establishment, was an insistence that important truths can get buried, out of deceit, laziness or misunderstanding."
We can only imagine what Stone would make of today's horse race brand of journalism.
(photo: via The Poynter Institute)
