It is impossible to glance through any newspaper, no matter what the say, the month, or the year, without finding on every line the most frightful traces of human perversity… Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, lecheries, tortures, the evil deeds of princes, of nations, of private individuals; an orgy of universal atrocity. And it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized man daily washes down his morning repast.
–– Charles Baudelaire (1860’s) from his journal as quoted in Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag p 137
