David Simon, the creater of “The Wire” has an essay in the March issue of Esquire about the newspaper business titled “A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back”.  Writes Simon, “I had read my Mencken. I knew what he said about newspapering, what he claimed for the profession. “The life of kings,” he called it. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that.  Emerging from childhood, I had seen Halberstam and Hersh take apart the fraudulent premises and practices of Vietnam, then followed daily as my hometown paper brought down Nixon for stealing an election and lying about it. My father, a public-relations man with latent ambitions as a newsman, took all the local papers and The New York Times on Sundays, as well as every newsmagazine. When I was twelve, he took me to Arena Stage for a Front Page revival. “Who the hell’s going to read the second paragraph?” wailed Walter Burns.”

Thanks to Lance Turner. His blog on the blogroll.