E L Doctorow writes tellingly of the role of newspapers and their importance to us:
“The outside perspective reduces everything to reasonable proportion. The paper is not the world, it is a simulacrum of the life of the world, its wars, famine, business, weather, politics, crime, sports, arts, science categorized and worked into stories flattened on folded newsprint.”
E L Doctorow, City of God (London: Abacus, 2001), 208.