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NSW Parliamentary Press Gallery Gone Mild ...

Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the Media Dragons, and its owners seem stricken by a failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age. Surveys showing that more and more young people get their news from television and computers breed a melancholy sense that the press is yesteryear's thing, a horse-drawn buggy on an eight-lane interstate.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. It has lost too much public respect. Courts that once treated it like a sleeping tiger now taunt it with insolent subpoenas and put in jail reporters who refuse to play ball with prosecutors. It is abused relentlessly on talk radio and in Internet blogs. It is easily bullied into acquiescing in the designs of a presidential propaganda machine determined to dominate the news.

Newspaper reporters were once heroes of the culture, played in films by the likes of Clark Gable or Robert Redford. Not Today ... I am not afraid of death anymore, says Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I feel it is a natural, but by no means the final, milestone of one’s existence Not today

A prosperous, lucky country turns out to have been founded on genocide. Clearly, Australia urgently needs an intelligentsia to help it emerge from its dark moral labyrinth. Why Intellectuals Like Genocide?