W. Joseph Campbell writes:
The “turning points” that journalists seem eager to find in dramatic events usually turn out to be mythical–chimeras built on a convenient if faulty and clichéd storyline. (…)
Bai’s “Week in Review” piece offered up this dubious point as well:
“A century ago, news traveled slowly enough for Americans to absorb and evaluate it; today’s events are almost instantaneously digested and debated, in a way that makes even the most cataclysmic event feel temporal.”
A century ago, news traveled rapidly by telegraph. It was scarcely unusual then for large-circulation urban newspapers to publish multiple extra editions to report fresh elements of a major breaking story.
During the Spanish-American War in 1898, for example, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal published as many as 40 extra editions a day. On such occasions, news surely wasn’t traveling slowly.
