Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Interpretation
The essence of journalism often involves conveying news to those who are unaware of it.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton critiques the nature of journalism, highlighting that much of it revolves around reporting events or facts to an audience that lacks the context or prior knowledge about those events. It suggests that journalism is not just about relaying facts; itβs about making connections between people and the information they receive, which can sometimes feel trivial when the audience is unaware of the subject matter.
In practice
During a journalism workshop, the instructor quoted Chesterton to emphasize the importance of context in reporting.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.
The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.
[F]or avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy . . . the only ground of hope must be on the morals of the people. I believe that religion is the only solid base of morals and that morals are the only possible support of free governments. [T]herefore education should teach the precepts of religion and the duties of man towards God.
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Those 62 million girls who are not being educated around the world impact my life in Washington, D.C., in the United States of America. Because if we aren't empowering and providing the skills and the resources to half of our population, then we're not realizing our full potential as a society, as mankind.
To maximise global social welfare, policymakers should strongly encourage the diffusion of knowledge from developed to developing countries.
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