Sublime

New Yorkers knew who was primarily responsible for the boon they had been given. It would have been difficult for them not to know. For the press was turning Robert Moses into a hero.

Perhaps more significant, he’s had a dramatic impact on how the media functions, the kinds of stories it tells, and journalists’ unwillingness to critique the left with the same zeal they attack the right.

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

The empathy and compassion for black Americans had always been there inside Lyndon Johnson, but it had always been held in check. Now it was unleashed. Lyndon Johnson believed in the need for a civil rights bill now, believed with that intensity which, in other crises in his career, had led him to take the “all or nothing” gamble, to “shove in his

David Brock, a conservative apostate who became a liberal activist, described the Heritage Foundation, where he was a young fellow, as almost completely under the thumb of its wealthy sponsors. In his tell-all book Blinded by the Right, he writes, “I saw how right-wing ideology was manufactured and controlled by a small group of powerful foundation

what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningf

He knew that the realization of that goal at which he had been aiming all his life required him to “produce” on civil rights—knew that “if I failed to produce on this one … everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.” And yet producing on civil rights seemed as hopeless a task as ever. A strong, meaningful, civil rights bil